


The Ghosts of Trakewood Asylum

by Falcolmreynolds



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror (mild), Gen, Ghosts, Horror, I'll add more as they appear - Freeform, Investigation, Outsider Perspective, POV Outsider, abandoned buildings, like always
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22232305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falcolmreynolds/pseuds/Falcolmreynolds
Summary: When Sabrina Arnborg, reporter for paranormal newspaper the Southwestern Eyewitness Weekly, gets a strange phone tip-off about Trakewood Asylum and Boarding School, something tells her to investigate further. The town of Trakewood, she finds, is centered entirely around the 196 acre grounds of the Asylum, almost entirely filled with dense woodland, hiding the buildings and their secrets deep inside.Sabrina intends to uncover them. She does not know what she is getting into.Trakewood is not a real place, though it is somewhat based off of a real place that does not share its name.Updates whenever I'm able to update it.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	1. The Call

Sabrina’s desk phone rang at 9:45 on the dot, fifteen minutes after she’d arrived for work. She answered it breathlessly, still recovering from her sprint up the three flights of stairs between the ground floor and her office.

“Hello, Southwestern Eyewitness Weekly,” she said, without checking the caller ID. “You’re speaking with Sabrina Arnborg. How can I help you?”

For a moment, there was silence. Sabrina grabbed for a notepad and a pen, settling the phone on her shoulder, and readied herself to take notes.

But the caller didn’t say anything. Sabrina frowned and began to actually pay attention to the call. “Hello?” she said again, carefully.

There was a sound on the other end, like shifting cloth, or perhaps paper. Sabrina wrinkled her nose. “Hello,” said a calm voice, finally, and it was distorted ever so slightly, as if through an old radio.

“Hello, how can I help you?” Sabrina said, again.

“You’re looking for the supernatural,” the voice said. It was middle-aged sounding, and female, a woman perhaps in her fifties. It was tinged ever so slightly with a British accent, a faint warp to the R and A sounds, and a crisp, clipped enunciation.

She said nothing else. Sabrina realized she was supposed to answer, even though the woman’s words had been a statement, not a question. “Uh, yes, we are,” she said, feeling a slight tingle of nervousness along her scalp. “May I ask who is calling?”

“If you’re really that curious, I would suggest you go to Trakewood,” the woman said. She did not answer Sabrina’s question. “There’s a very old and interesting building there you may want to see.”

“Trakewood?” The name rang a bell, but Sabrina couldn’t recall exactly what it was off the top of her head. “Um - sure, sure… spelled T-R-A-K-E and then wood?”

“Yes.”

Sabrina jotted it down, after scribbling a few loops to get the pen’s ink to flow: ‘Trakewood, old building?’ “Alright, sure,” she said, feeling mildly baffled. “Have there been any specific occurrences that you’d like to detail for us?”

“Ghosts,” the woman said. “All types. Everywhere, through the Asylum.”

Oh, lord. Sabrina wrote down the word ‘Asylum,’ feeling her spirits sink. This was pretty stereotypical - it could be a prank. “What kind of ghosts?”

“Old ones,” the woman said. “And new.”

 _Not one for chatting, is she?_ Sabrina thought, and swallowed. “Is - is there anything else you’d like to add?”

“No,” the woman said. “Goodbye.”

The line went dead. Sabrina pulled the phone away from her face, baffled, and stared at the display. The caller ID read only the word “Restricted.”

“Uh, well, that’s weird,” she said, staring at it.

“What’s weird?” Christopher J. O’Doyle, her boss, said, as he sidled by with a cup of coffee. He glanced down at her desk, swinging around to get a better look at her notepad.

She turned it to face him. “Just got a very weird phone call,” she told him, looking up. “It could have been a prank, but it was really just… strange. Have you ever heard of Trakewood?”

“Trakewood?” he paused, mulling it over. “Can’t say that I have. But I’m from Athens, so I didn’t grow up around here and don’t really know.”

“I feel like it’s, um… north-ish of the area,” Sabrina said, and Googled it. Chris stood next to her desk, watching.

Trakewood was north of the dual-city area, just a bit. From what Sabrina could see in the various photos, it looked… a little run-down, to be honest. “Uh, I’m not sure about this,” she said, glancing up at Chris. “This seems pretty sketchy.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” he murmured, and then, “Oh!”

He pointed at the screen. Sabrina followed his finger and spotted a photograph of what looked like a dense deciduous woodland opening up over a paved drive that led to the front gates of an enormous building, wide white marble steps leading up to a double door entrance. The drive was circular, with a fountain in the center, though it didn’t look to be in operation. Fallen leaves blanketed the interior of the fountain’s basin, so it must have been turned off in the winter.

Written in scrawling iron letters that arced above the massive entryway were the words ‘TRAKEWOOD ASYLUM AND BOARDING SCHOOL.’

“It was… both?” Sabrina said, wrinkling her nose. “That seems like a bad combo.”

“Maybe we should research this,” Chris said, and when Sabrina looked up at him again, she saw that bright spark in his eyes that meant he had found something truly intriguing. “Sabrina, I want you to research this.”

“I - oh, fine,” Sabrina said, rolling her eyes. “Someone else has to take my subway station story though.”

“Done and done, I’ll reassign it. I’ll let you know who picks it up, email all your stuff to the new person.” Chris turned again and sauntered away, raising his coffee cup in a salute.

“And if I have to investigate this place I’m taking someone with me!” Sabrina called after him.

“Sure!” he replied, before rounding a cubicle corner.

Sabrina sighed. Looks like she was on the ‘creepy mental hospital in the middle of a run down town’ case. This _surely_ couldn’t be a prank pulled on them by some particularly enterprising teenagers with a vocal distortion program or an indulgent middle-aged friend.

Something about the woman’s voice, though, still made her skin crawl, even just to remember it. She shivered, glancing around - there were very few people on the floor at this time of morning, and she suddenly wished she knew where they were. She was usually fine with creepy things, but this… she just wanted to know someone else was nearby.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, shaking her head. “What am I thinking? The ghosts aren’t going to pop out of the screen and strangle me.”

To work, then. Sabrina set about researching Trakewood Asylum and Boarding School for what ended up being several hours, and discovered a few things: the place was actually three buildings in one, two buildings devoted to the school and its dormitories, and one devoted to the aforementioned asylum portion of the complex. Additionally, the complex was over two hundred fifty years old - it was first built, founded, in 1774, though by whom, Sabrina oddly could not uncover. That confused her - normally the founders were held in quite high esteem, and for some reason, the only name she could find that was referenced as a possible founder was one “Benedict,” with no last name given.

“That’s really weird,” she muttered, jotting it down. “This is really, really weird.”

The Asylum had been the centerpiece of Trakewood for centuries, situated on 196 acres of almost untouched woodland, or so the internet said. Sabrina found a few photos of the grounds - utterly gorgeous, with massive old trees and an on-site church and cemetery tucked away in the forest - and some very old rosters of children from the boarding school portion.

She found the years it had started operating, but what she did _not_ find were the years it shut down. As far as she could tell… it never had.

“Uh, Chris,” she called, when she spotted him idly making his way through the floor again, “I’m not so sure about this.”

Chris ambled over, coffee cup still in his hand. “Why’s that?”

“The place has never been officially shut down, so it might… still be in operation.”

“Hmm.” Chris squinted at her screen. “That _could_ be an issue, you’re right. What did the caller tell you, again?”

“She just said it was ghosts. All throughout the Asylum.”

“Maybe check police reports if you can, see if the place is actually abandoned. Looks to me like it hasn’t been used in at least several years, judging from the disrepair in some of these photographs.” Chris nodded towards the Google image search still open on one of Sabrina’s monitors. “Still… if it _is_ inhabitated, that’s not too much of a problem. You just need to get permission from the current owners to conduct an investigation and you’re golden.”

“Oh. True. Right.” Sabrina nodded. “Right. I can’t find any contact information for them online, but I’ll do my best.”

“Roger that,” Chris said, and wandered off again.

In the end, Sabrina couldn’t find any real reason _not_ to go. But she knew she wasn’t going alone, that was for certain. Chris agreed to expense her gas, and overnight lodgings; the place was only two hours away, but the nature of an investigation would require them to stay multiple days and check out different parts of the estate.

Of her colleagues, only one was free and willing to go with her on this investigation: Melody Holme. Sabrina had chatted with Melody many times, and could even consider the two of them friends, though it wasn’t as if they hung out outside of work or anything.

“Creepy old asylum?” Melody said, when Sabrina approached her. She tapped her fingernails against her lips - fingernails painted bright red, matching the lip gloss - and nodded. “Sure, I’m into it. I love old abandoned places. And if it’s not abandoned, well, at least it looks like it is. You have masks and everything that you’ll need? If the place is that old, it’s gonna have some stuff you want masks for.”

“Oh, I - um, I hadn’t considered that,” Sabrina said, blinking.

“That’s why I’m around. You get the hotels sorted, and I’ll get us some exploration gear.” Melody grinned. “Just you wait, Sabi. I think this’ll be fun.”

“Right, sure.” _Sabi? Eh, sure, why not._ Sabrina made her excuses and headed back to the desk to make hotel reservations. They’d go during the upcoming weekend, which didn’t really bother her - it wasn’t like she had anything to do anyways. She didn’t have a whole lot of friends in the area, and hadn’t had any plans for the weekend.

Maybe Melody was right, and it would be fun! She had done a little bit of exploration in her reports, but nothing like this. As she closed the Ecosia tab she’d booked through, she felt a surge of excitement. Melody was older than her by a few years, and had much more experience with this sort of thing. She’d have a chance to learn from her coworker while they were up there.

The Asylum was starting to look more like a real story, if even just one of an old, creaky building with some drafty windows. Sabrina could already picture the photographs in the Eyewitness, of dramatic empty halls or lonely-looking old dormitory rooms.

This was going to be an adventure.


	2. Arrival

“Uh, holy shit,” Melody said, leaning forwards until her forehead bumped against the windshield. “Holy shit?”

“That’s… that’s really something.” Sabrina gulped down a wave of nervousness. They’d checked into their hotel and dropped most of their things off, and gone for a cursory look at the Asylum. It was just before noon now.

They’d gone halfway up the drive towards the Asylum grounds before getting too nervous to continue. Now, they were sitting, engine idling, on the long pathway that led towards the massive brick wall that surrounded the Asylum’s grounds.

Even from here, the Asylum was intimidating. The trees beyond the wall stretched further up than Sabrina had thought they could, almost like an extension of the wall itself; a dark, solid barrier between the world and the complex within. It looked impassable, impenetrable.

“You know,” Melody said, “maybe we should have lunch and come back here when it’s a little bit sunnier.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Sabrina said, too quickly, and pulled a six-point turn on the narrow drive to get away from the menacing place.

Once the Asylum was in her rearview mirror, she felt a little better about it, but she still couldn’t shake that shivery anxiety. She thought maybe it would vanish once the Asylum was out of sight, but even as they drove into Trakewood’s version of a historic downtown, they could still see the canopy of the Asylum’s woodland, a dark blot over the building-tops.

The town was… lackluster, to be polite. “God,” Melody said, peering out the passenger side window as they headed down what passed for a main street. “No offense, and pardon my French, but this place is a shithole.”

Sabrina had to agree. The buildings here were run-down, coated with layers of grime; even from the main street, she could see a few houses that were boarded up, even one that looked like it had burned down a few years ago,leaving only the blackened skeleton behind. There were very few cars around - they passed perhaps two while driving in, and Sabrina couldn’t spot any people walking about either. There were some “Center of Trakewood” banners strung over the main street, but they were tattered around the edges, stained with age.

“What happened to this place?” Sabrina murmured. Melody just shook her head, wordless.

There was a diner - Dreeson’s - that didn’t look  _ too _ atrocious, so they pulled off into the cracked parking lot and got out. The air was colder than Sabrina had expected, and she shivered. Good thing she’d brought a light coat.

“Mel, you alright?” she asked, glancing over as her colleague stepped out of the car - Melody was wearing a less practical jacket, a denim affair that cut off at her ribs.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Melody replied, turning, though she did rub her arms for a moment, shivering. “I brought my windbreaker.” She stripped off the denim jacket and tossed it into the backseat, pulling out a black jacket instead and donning it hastily. It still looked fashionable, somehow; Melody always managed to pull off a style, no matter what she wore.

“Ah, great. Smart.” Sabrina shut her car door and looked doubtfully towards the diner. Thankfully, Melody took the lead, swinging her purse over one shoulder and setting off. Sabrina beeped the car’s remote lock and followed.

The interior of the diner looked only marginally better than the exterior. The floor was swept, though Sabrina could see the grime buildup in the corners where their mop didn’t quite reach, and spots on the window glass of the storefront and counter displays. There were two other people in the diner, including the woman who loitered behind the cash register and wandered over after a few minutes to hand them two laminated menus.

It wasn’t that the place felt malicious, though. The woman didn’t scowl, or mutter, or give them strange looks. She just seemed tired.

For diner food, it was… average quality. They had sandwiches; there was allegedly a soup option, but Sabrina wasn’t going to chance it. She ordered a ham and swiss, and it came in a slightly longer than average time. Melody got herself some kind of salad, but only ate part of it; the leaves were soggy and stained with oxidation.

“It’s not worth complaining,” she said, when Sabrina gave her a pensive look. “It really isn’t. These people are so tired! They don’t deserve us being jerks to them over some old leaves.”

“Yeah…” Sabrina glanced over to the cashier, and then out the main window. From where they were, she could see up and down the main street… and also, distantly, she could see the dark blot of Trakewood’s forest looming on the horizon. It made her shiver.

This place was sad. Very sad. She didn’t know what had happened, but for some reason, she almost wanted to blame the Asylum. But that didn’t make any sense.

She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “Alright,” she said, “well. Should we go prepare for our first foray?”

“I think we should,” Melody said. “Are you going to eat your side, by the way?”

“No, you can have it.”

They left the diner and headed back to the hotel. It was just past noon, and there was no putting it off any longer: they had to try and make their way towards the Asylum.

“So, we’re going to try and find someone. If we can’t, we’ll come back here, rest up, and prepare to do some photoshooting tomorrow, yeah?” Melody said, as she shook out her scarf and laid it on the bed.

“That sounds about right to me,” Sabrina said, and frowned. “Um, I was going to follow your lead, here… I’m not in charge of this!”

Melody shrugged. “You’re the one that got the weird phone call.”

“That was chance. Anybody could’ve picked it up.”

“I mean, yeah, of course it was  _ chance _ , but you’re still the one that ended up with it. So, you know…” Mel shrugged. “You’re kind of the lead investigator on this story.”

“It’s not even a st - oh, Lord,” Sabrina said, rubbing her forehead. “I’ve never been lead investigator on anything! Well, that’s not true. But I’ve never been lead on a new story! And there haven’t really been any articles about this place at all, ever.”

“Looks like this one’s gonna be your big break, then,” Melody said, with a grin. “Or it’ll just be some nice photos of an empty manor.”

“I kind of hope it’s the latter. That place is creepy.”

“We investigate ghost reports. Everywhere we  _ go _ is creepy.”

That was a fair enough point; Sabrina couldn’t really argue with it. She grabbed her coat, her things, and they headed out to the car.

At this point, early afternoon, the sky was still plenty light, something Sabrina was deeply grateful for. She was glad she’s insisted upon them leaving so early; it was turning towards autumn, and the days had begun to end earlier than she liked. She wanted to get into the Asylum and out again before nightfall. Of course, given the opportunity, they’d be in there during the night, to search for ghosts, but she wasn’t prepared for that right now.

The drive up to the Asylum was no less menacing than it was the first time. She swallowed her anxiety as they passed the point where they’d driven to the first time, taking a few turns and heading over a wide expanse of mowed lawn to the point where the massive brick wall rose from the grass, blocking off the forest on the other side. Blocking the roadway was a huge iron gate.

There didn’t seem to be any sort of camera system anywhere, and the gates didn’t open. Sabrina sat there for a moment, staring at the heavy black iron, and then Melody sighed and opened the door, unclipping her seat belt. Sabrina glanced over, eyes wide. “Where are you going?”

“Relax,” Melody said, stepping out of the car. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to try the gate.”

“I don’t know if this is what we’re supposed to be doing,” Sabrina called, after her.

“If it’s unlocked, it’s not exactly breaking and entering. And there’s certainly no ‘no trespassing’ signs anywhere.” Melody strolled up to the big iron gate. She looked it up and down. “There’s not even a chain or anything.”

“Still…”

Reaching out, Melody grasped the iron with one hand, then tugged on it. It didn’t budge, but when she pushed, the gate smoothly swung inwards, without a sound.

“Look at that!” Melody said, beaming in Sabrina’s direction. “Easy.”

“O-kay.” Sabrina gripped the steering wheel. “I don’t - okay. Sure, if it… if… alright.”

Melody headed back to the passenger side of the car and slid in, pulling the door shut. “Let’s go,” she said, looking quite pleased with herself.

“Are you sure?”

“You didn’t come all this way to cop out now, did you?” Melody grinned at her. “We are  _ not _ leaving without taking a look around. Don’t be afraid, it’s just an old asylum.”

“You know, normal people don’t do this,” Sabrina muttered, but steeled herself anyway. Melody was right - why  _ was _ she afraid? It wasn’t like there was anything actually wrong with the building. It was just old. Besides, they’d be leaving and coming back another time, probably. This was just a look around, and an attempt to find the owner.

Sabrina drove through. Once they were past the gates - which were easily double the height of the car - she paused. “Should we… shut the gate behind us?”

“Oh, probably a good idea. In case there isn’t any owner here, we don’t want to arouse suspicion.”

It wasn’t like they were doing anything illegal - as Melody had pointed out, there weren’t any “no trespassing” warnings, and they hadn’t broken in - but for some reason Sabrina felt like they should try to keep their activities private. She leaned forwards and peered through the windshield; overhead, the trees blocked out the sunlight, sending a dappling of color across the forest floor around them. That carefully mowed lawn was completely gone; on either side of the road, leaf litter carpeted a barren forest floor, sometimes giving way to ferns or bushes, or smaller trees. There was surprisingly little clutter in this woodland. Sabrina could see quite a distance through it, almost like the halls of a grand building.

Melody got out of the car again and jogged over to the gate to push it shut. Despite being so massive, it moved easily. It swung back into place, quiet as ever, and stayed still.

“Nice gate,” Melody commented, as she moved back to the car.

“Yeah.” Sabrina waited until Melody had shut her door, then quietly moved the car into drive and headed into the forest. With the sun out, the area seemed much friendlier, the colors of the woodland washing her fears away in a wave of green. She could hear birdsong ringing through the trees, and even once saw a flash of what might have been a deer bounding away through the trees. “This is actually really pretty. I didn’t expect it to be so pretty.”

“Neither did I, honestly,” Melody agreed, peering around. “Wow…”

They drove onwards, into the trees, towards Trakewood Asylum, leaving the dying city behind.


	3. Trakewood Asylum and Boarding School

The drive in took longer than Sabrina thought it would. She didn’t really mind - it was beautiful. The trees overhead didn’t seem to have begun to change color yet, but the bright spattering of leaves across the forest floor, practically glowing when they caught the light, told her that some of them must have. The air was clear, and shafts of sunlight cut through the wide open spaces between the great trunks.

“These trees must be really old,” Sabrina said, as they passed one with a trunk thicker through than her car was wide. “Like, really old. This is, like… this place is ancient! I mean the forest. I know the Asylum is old.”

“I guess so,” Melody said. “Maybe they preserved some woodland and it never got cut down.”

“I feel like that information would’ve popped up during the research phase, right? That would make it some of the oldest forest in Ohio. I feel like that’s important somehow?”

“Hell if I know. I don’t know anything about parks.”

Sabrina subsided. “Maybe,” she said, to herself. “Or maybe nobody cares too much about old forests. I dunno.”

The car slid around a final corner, and suddenly, unexpectedly, there it was. The drive opened into a wide circle of cracked pavement around a large, dormant fountain, and standing behind it was a massive building, elegant and stately, with those marble steps and that old, beautiful sign hanging above the door. Trakewood Asylum and Boarding School.

“Well, here we are!” Melody announced cheerfully. Sabrina pulled the car halfway around the drive, up to the front steps, and parked it. Once the sound of the engine died away, it struck Sabrina how  _ quiet _ it was here, behind the birdsong and the occasional gust of wind. The sounds rang out like bells in a cathedral, against a backdrop of stillness.

“Huh,” Sabrina said. She got out of the car, as did Melody, this time holding her bag.

“First things first,” Melody said. “We knock. Ring the doorbell. If nobody answers, we can find our way in. If we do get in, and the place is decrepit, we’re using masks.”

“Right,” Sabrina agreed. Melody had gone over this with her before - old buildings were never safe to explore, and they had to be constantly on the lookout for dangerous portions of floor, or weird molds, or other assorted hazards. To make it a little easier, Melody had brought along some P100-cartridge-equipped breathing masks, which were pretty standard for investigating old ghost haunts.

The two of them moved around the car and up to the main door. It was huge, old and dark, deep brown wood stained and chipped from literal centuries of weathering. There was brass embroidery on it, but the gold was dimmed by a thick layer of grime.

“Hmm,” Melody said, eyeing it critically. “Methinks nobody’s here anymore.”

Sabrina raised one hand and knocked.

Under the soft pressure of the knock, which rang out like a cymbal crash in the quiet woods, the door gave, swinging gently open to reveal a dark, dusty interior hall. Sabrina froze, her hand still up, and looked to Melody.

“Masks on,” Melody said.

Sabrina followed her lead immediately, stepping back from the door and fumbling for the mask in her bag. She settled it over her mouth and nose, pulled the straps over behind her hair, and tightened them before pressing one palm over the mouthpiece and exhaling to check the fit. It was sealed. Melody pulled out a pair of safety goggles and put them over her own eyes, and handed Sabrina a pair as well before heading through the door.

“Hello?” she called, to the empty room.  _ Bold, _ Sabrina thought. It seemed almost rude to disrupt the silence.

No one answered. Sabrina followed her in, though she kept her eyes on the floor. “Floor’s wood,” she called, to Melody. “If there’s a basement…”

“I see it,” Melody said back to her. “Stay close.”

“Right. Right.”

The floor seemed relatively solid, though it was never safe to walk across open wooden floors in places you weren’t familiar with. Melody went around the side of the room, following the wall until she could take a quick route over some open ground to the stairs, and Sabrina followed her. The area was dark - Sabrina wished they’d brought their headlamps - and the stairs creaked when they stepped on them, but only quietly. The interior of the building was warm and dark and soft. The shadows seemed to have almost a fuzzy edge to them, dreamlike.

The second floor had a number of windows that let the daylight from outside spill through, puddling on the floor and illuminating the hallways and the motes of dust that hung nearly motionless in the beams.

“Hello?” Sabrina called, down a long hallway. Melody glanced towards the other side of the stairs, but there was no movement, no signs of life.

“Huh,” she said, with a shrug. “I guess we just try to find any sort of administrative office to see if it’s in use. Though, like, I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be.”

It took them a careful half an hour to locate the administrative office. They actually overlooked it the first time, because they were using their phone flashlights (which had a fairly limited range) and it was nearly empty, just a single large desk and an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair. A second glance, though, revealed that the desk drawers - which weren’t decayed or damaged at all - were filled with mostly nothing, but held a few old journals and papers, and notably, a brass nameplate that had probably sat on the desk at one point in time. It read “MADAME DIRECTOR.”

“Ooh,” Melody said, picking it up and shining her phone light on it. “This seems important.”

“Huh. I guess this is where the director would be…? If there was one.” Sabrina raised her light and looked around the room; it looked as if nobody had used it in quite some time.

“Sure looks like it,” Melody said. She turned the nameplate over in her hands. “Wish this gave us, like, an actual name instead of just a title. But whatever, that’s fine. You know what this  _ does _ tell us? That this place is abandoned, and we can pretty much just do whatever.”

“True that,” Sabrina agreed. She glanced about, shining her phone flashlight slowly over the walls; this room had been wallpapered in plain white at some point, but it was peeling. Not as much as she’d expected, but peeling. It looked… sad. “We can go ahead and explore as much as we want, then. Right?”

“Yep. I mean, as long as nobody causes a fuss about it, we’re good. The owner isn’t around for us to negotiate with, if there even is an owner at this point.” Melody’s eyes crinkled up, showing her smile behind her mask. “We should prep up and come back tomorrow.”

“Sure, yeah, agreed.” Sabrina looked over the desk. “I kinda wanna look at some of this stuff, though…”

“Sure. Take your time. It’s only afternoon.” Melody patted her pocket. “We don’t have our cameras, though, so we can’t get any really good photos.”

Sabrina shrugged. “If one of these is particularly interesting, I’ll just photograph it with my phone.”

Melody slapped the wall gently with one hand. “I’m gonna look at the other rooms we already scoped out to see what  _ else _ we missed,” she said. “We’ve already been through them, so I know they’re safe, and I won’t go more than a few rooms away. That okay?”

For a moment, Sabrina hesitated. “We’re not supposed to investigate alone,” she said.

“I won’t go anywhere, just checking out next door. You’ll be able to hear me call if I raise my voice even a little.” Melody raised an eyebrow. “You know I wouldn’t suggest this if I didn’t think it was safe.”

She was right; Melody had more experience with this than Sabrina did, and was usually more cautious. “All right,” Sabrina relented, and tested the old wooden chair with one hand. “Sure thing.”

Melody beamed at her, though of course, Sabrina couldn’t see her mouth. “I’ll be right back!” she said, happily, and sidled out into the hall and out of sight.

With her gone, the room seemed suddenly much more quiet. Sabrina set her phone so the flashlight shone on the ceiling, reflecting light through the whole office, then sat down in the desk chair and pulled out some of the old records, wincing as the paper crackled under her fingertips.

Mostly, it seemed, they were service records of various maintenance and improvement jobs, though Sabrina did find mixed in amongst the files a resident list from what seemed to be 1859. The names were written in a clean cursive script, each letter elegant and perfect, though faded. Each name was old-sounding in style, things like “Kingsley Reid” and “Elijah Marshall.” She set those aside, though she did take a few photographs with her phone. Maybe she could look some of these people up later.

The maintenance records were interesting for one major fact: they referred to at least three different buildings. There was the Asylum, the Dormitory, and the School, judging by what the papers said. Were there more buildings buried somewhere in Trakewood’s sprawling woodland?

If only she could find a map of the area. Sabrina sighed, tapping her fingers on the desk’s lacquered surface. Maybe she could try Google Maps. That might show her where any buildings were, though there was a chance that anything built on Trakewood’s grounds would be hidden from above by the trees.

Hmmm.

A puff of cool air blew over the back of her neck; she shivered, then glanced behind her. For a moment, it almost felt as if someone else were in the room with her.

_ Ghosts? _

“Hello?” she said, nervously, squinting into the murk.

There was no answer. Sabrina turned in her seat. The room was small, only about ten by fifteen feet or so, with no doors but the one from the hall and no windows.

Though now that she looked, she saw something she’d somehow missed before - a painting, propped up against the back wall. It was covered with an old sheet, and Sabrina carefully got up, grabbing her phone for the light, and walked over to pull it off.

The painting underneath was of a woodland, just like the one outside, but this woodland was… different. Where the trees of Trakewood were tall and strong, with sunlight streaming between them and accenting their bold colors, the trees in this photo were washed-out silhouettes in a nearly grayscale landscape, the ground swathed in curls of fog. The painting didn’t show any more than the very nearest patches of forest floor; everything else was obscured by the mist. The more distant trees were just looming shadows.

Sabrina stared at it. “Um,” she said, to herself. “That’s not exactly… comforting.” The painting unnerved her slightly; she draped the sheet back over top and left it be.

Well. Google Maps for the extra buildings, and as much bonus research as she could tonight. She shivered. The room was warm enough, but she still felt chilled.

“Hey, Sabi?” came a voice, and Sabrina turned and moved back to the door, poking her head out.

“Yeah?” she called, down the hall.

“Found a window looking out! There’s a courtyard in the middle of this building, but it’s kind of destroyed.” Footsteps echoed, and Melody appeared from a nearby door. “Super weird that the main office doesn’t have a window that looks out into it. From what I can see it’s in the right place to have one.”

“Maybe they boarded it up or something,” Sabrina mused, and then frowned. “Why would anybody do that?”

“Personal preference? Maybe the Madame Director hated sunlight.”

“Maybe. Aren’t some people, like, allergic to sunlight?”

“Yeah, sure, vampires.” Melody rolled her eyes. “Anyway, come see this courtyard.”

Sabrina stepped over to the room Melody was in, leaving the office behind. This one was significantly brighter, as there was in fact a window looking out into the open air. It was broken, the glass laying in fragments on the wood floor, and the air that blew in was pleasantly scented with the smell of forest decay. “Huh,” Sabrina said, avoiding the glass as she joined Melody by the window and peered out.

The courtyard beyond was large, and had probably once been well-cared-for. Now the place looked as if it had been abandoned for several years, the pathways and water features choked with weeds and the trees unpruned.

“Doesn’t seem that old,” Melody said, folding her arms. “But, like, nobody’s touched it in a while.”

“For sure. We can get some really nice shots in there.” Sabrina took a photo with her phone, turning the flash off. “Wow, this place is pretty.”

“Yeah. Send some photos to Chris, make him jealous he didn’t come look himself.”

Sabrina laughed. “I will.”

Aside from that, they didn’t want to investigate any further just yet - they didn’t have all the equipment they needed with them. That would come tomorrow. Sabrina took a few more photos, marveling at how wild and yet how stately the courtyard looked, then followed Melody as she headed back out and down the stairs.

They scooted around the edge of the main room - no sense in trying their luck with the floor, though all the floors so far had seemed to be solid and in quite good condition - and headed back out to the car. As soon as they were out the main doors, Melody pulled off her safety goggles and mask, gasping in the fresh air. “Whoof!” she said, grinning, and leaned against the passenger side of the door. “Well!”

Sabrina tugged her own mask and goggles off and rubbed at the lines where they’d pressed into her skin. “Yeah, no kidding,” she said, shaking her head. “This place is really something.”

She expected Melody to respond to her, but when she looked up, her colleague was frozen in place, staring at something just above and behind her.

“...Mel?”

“What is that,” Melody said, voice flat with fear.

Sabrina turned, heart in her throat. For a moment she saw nothing, and then -

It was like an undulating curtain, black and silky in the shadows of the main hall. It blotted out part of the stairwell, nebulous, hanging in the air and rippling. The shape was indistinct, but it was taller than it was wide, and thin. Sabrina immediately got the distinct feeling that it was looking right back at her.

Then it moved, towards them just a bit, and she leaped backwards, fear sending all her neurons firing. She stumbled into her car with a high-pitched squeak and immediately went for her keys. For a second, she had to look down, to fumble them out of her pocket, and when she looked up again -

The shape was gone.

Melody was pressed up against her car, eyes wide, mouth open just a tad.

“Where did it go, where did it go,” Sabrina babbled, rushing around to the driver’s side. “Where is it!”

“It went back in, like it pulled itself backwards into the building,” Melody said. “I don’t want to stop looking. I feel like if I do it’s gonna come out.”

“Okay, well, keep your eyes on the door while you get in the car let’s go let’s go let’s  _ go!” _

Melody did so while Sabrina frantically started the car. The engine rumbled to life as it always did, and Melody sat down sideways and pulled her legs in before yanking the door shut. Sabrina, without waiting for her coworker to buckle in, immediately threw the car into drive and pressed down hard on the gas.

Nothing followed them. Melody kept her eyes on the door, staring at it while they curved away around the fountain and back down the long drive. She kept her eyes fixed on the spot long after they’d driven out of sight.

“Holy shit,” Sabrina said, when they rolled to a stop a safe distance from the gate.

Melody let out a long breath. “I’ll get the gate,” she said, her voice ever so slightly shaky. She got out and pulled the gate open. When she grabbed it, Sabrina had a brief, terrifying fantasy of it refusing to open, but it swung silently inwards just as it had before.

Sabrina took the car through and waited while Melody closed the gate and came back to the car. She was quiet as Sabrina drove away from Trakewood Asylum and Boarding school.

Back they went, to the run-down town, to their sad hotel with its flickering lights and empty parking lot. They pulled into the spot outside their room, and both sat there for a moment after Sabrina turned the engine off.

“So,” Melody finally said, into the dead stillness of the car interior. She looked over at Sabrina; her face was still pale, but there was a light in her eyes, and a disbelieving, almost ecstatic laugh in her voice when she spoke. “Ghosts, huh?”


	4. Overcast

“So, earlier, I hadn’t been sure if we actually _needed_ all this,” Melody said, “but now I’m like one hundred percent certain that we do, and I’m bringing it. All of it.”

Spread out on her bed was a wildly varying assortment of items. Sabrina recognized most of it - she’d used some of these trinkets herself a time or two, during her various investigations into the paranormal. There was a plastic bottle with a spot that undoubtedly contained holy water, a spirit box, an EMF detector, a set of walkie-talkies, a handheld camera that Sabrina knew was a thermal imaging camera, and a small pocket-sized Bible, among other things.

“No, I fully agree,” she said. “I super duper agree that we probably need like all of this.”

“I don’t know what that thing yesterday was, but I really don’t want to tangle with it!” Melody shook her head. “Not interested. Not into it. I mean, maybe get a photo or two. But other than that no _freaking_ thank you.”

Sabrina had sent Chris a report on what they’d encountered in the building the night before, and had gotten a reply back. He was highly interested in the investigation, and overjoyed that they’d actually spotted a ghost - or something like a ghost, anyway - in the building’s main hall on their _first day_ of trying to poke about. So they were going back, but better equipped this time, with more of an arsenal of tools, and better protection.

The Southwestern Eyewitness Weekly was a newspaper that examined the paranormal on a regular basis. Its reporters very commonly came into contact with supernatural entities, and as such, all of them were trained (as well as anyone could be) in how to deal with them - and had a number of protective charms they were required to wear.

The very first time she’d gone on a ghost hunt, Sabrina had scoffed at the charms. Then she, while wearing them, had been charged by a spectre made of mist and light in an old theater, and it had nearly gotten to her before hitting some kind of bubble and evaporating, as best as she could remember it. She’d felt its anger right before it had been dissipated by the little necklace her then-manager Kelly had pressed into her hand before she’d left the office. It had been so, so furious, so filled with an impossible rage that she had been too stunned by the force of its anger to try and move away from it. But the charm had saved her.

So, needless to say, she wore them now.

“The, um… apparition occurred in the main hall,” Melody said. “So we definitely need to watch out for that area.”

“Honestly, I’m wondering if maybe we should take a look at the other buildings,” Sabrina said. She’d done a good deal of squinting at the overhead satellite view of Google Maps, and had spotted a few lines twisting through Trakewood’s massive patch of woodland that could be roads. She’d screenshotted them, drawn over the potential roads in red, and emailed herself the pictures. “I know there’s at least two more.”

“Yeah, you mentioned,” Melody said, folding her arms and frowning down at the spread of gadgetry. “I definitely agree. I’m really worried about the actual _asylum_ building, to be honest, because, um, ghosts? If they’re anywhere, they’re gonna be there. We saw one in just the like… main administration and school building.”

Sabrina drummed her fingertips on her arm. “Right. So we should be able to, I dunno… maybe get some really good shots, if we’re lucky. And not get haunted.”

“I’m already haunted by my past decisions,” Melody muttered, rolling her eyes. “Alright. Do you think we need anything else?”

“Do we have spare batteries for all the gear? The last thing I want to do is get trapped in an _Outlast_ situation where I have to scrounge for batteries while getting chased by a sentient bug swarm or whatever God decides to torture me with today.”

“We should, I bought another pack before we left.” Melody dug around in her backpack for a moment before coming up with a plastic package of batteries. “Yeah. Here. ”

“Awesome.” Sabrina nodded a few times. “I guess we’re good to go, then?”

“...yeah.”

Both of them stood there for a moment more, almost unwilling to move. Melody stirred first, putting the batteries back in her bag.

Sabrina packed her own backpack full of equipment and made sure her charms were hung securely around her neck. She and Melody both were dressed in comfortable, practical clothing (that didn’t look bad, mind you - in case they were in photos, they needed to not seem like delinquents) for their exploration. 

And then that was it. They loaded their bags into the car, and Sabrina drove them back to Trakewood Asylum and Boarding School.

The morning was partly cloudy. “Hopefully the lighting cooperates with us,” Sabrina said, sparing a glance or two towards the sky as they drove.

“Hopefully. If it gets overcast, that’ll be fine,” Melody said. “Just lets us have a more diffuse tone. Might not even have to filter the photos if that happens! Though honestly we might have to take the contrast down in post and grayscale them so they aren’t so, you know, cheerful.”

“Cheerful?"

Melody rolled her eyes. “Okay, definitely the wrong word to use there, but like, you know. Vibrant, maybe? So lively.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s fair.” Sabrina shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting the place to be so… perfect, honestly. For our purposes.”

“Neither was I. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be a bust, but dang.”

Sabrina tried to ignore the town as they drove through it. The place looked, if possible, even less lively than it had the day before. It felt oppressive, and she shivered, only relaxing once they’d entered the area around Trakewood and driven up towards the gate.

As with the day before, Melody got out and opened the gate. It looked just like it had the day before, no chain, black iron, silent as a foggy morning. Sabrina pulled the car through, waited for Melody to swing the gate back shut, and then collected her and drove onwards.

The day did not brighten in the few minutes between the gate and the main building, and when Sabrina turned the car’s engine off, the silence was almost oppressive. Her breath, and Melody’s, sounded unbelievably loud in the still interior of the car.

She glanced over. Melody was staring at the glovebox, off into space, and finally took a deep breath and raised her head, expression brightening. “No time like the present,” she said, and reached over, opening the car door.

Sabrina followed her. She grabbed her bag from the back of the car, then pulled out her mask and glasses, settling them over her face. Melody did the same, also pulling her curly hair back into a bun to keep it out of her face and out of the mask. “Alright!” she said, voice muffled by the mask. “I’m ready. Are you ready?”

“One second,” Sabrina muttered, her arms twisted behind her. She was winding her thick black hair into a long plait, which she settled underneath a green and white baseball cap. “Alright.”

Both of them approached the front door, staring at it. It was hanging open, just as it had been when they’d left it the day before, and Sabrina squinted at the shadowed entryway beyond it, trying to spot any hint of the strange, shadowy thing that had so terrorized the the day before.

She couldn’t see it, and while she was _pretty_ sure that was a good thing, she also felt uneasy - where was it, then? Where was the ghost? Was it still here? Was it behind them? The last thought made her shudder and glance back to her car, but there were no dark, wavering figures in the circular drive, nothing standing next to that old fountain.

“Hello,” Melody called, into the building, as they stepped over the threshold. “Hello? We’re here to take some photographs of this place. We’re not here to hurt you, or to cause trouble or anything. We just want to record this place so that others can see it. Leave us be and we won’t touch anything you don’t want us to, and we’ll leave after we’ve gotten some pictures and everything. We promise we aren’t going to disrupt the place. Please, just leave us alone.”

Her voice echoed in the entry hall, and there was no response.

“I guess that’s that,” Melody murmured.

“Okay,” Sabrina said. “Okay! So. Where are we headed first?”

She’d saved a map of the area on her phone, a large image she’d made on her laptop the night before, with the various locations of interest highlighted. There weren’t any photos from inside the Asylum, of course - they were the first ones to have gotten in here to report on the place.

“That courtyard looked pretty nice,” Sabrina said, glancing up. “If we can figure out how to get to it, that might get us some really pretty shots.”

“Sure, sure.” Melody nodded. “Um, not to push, but like, let’s go there _fast._ I just… I don’t like this particular, um, room.”

“Can we get that on tape?” Sabrina muttered, but didn’t go for the recorder. She felt it too; the main hall of Trakewood’s administrative building felt… almost hostile. She wanted to get away from it.

They headed through the main hall and underneath the massive staircase. Behind it, a hallway led to a closed double door, but one half of it appeared to be hanging slightly off its hinges, and there were dark stains on the floor where water had crept in, softening the wooden floor and walls and paving the way for moss, lichen, and the creeping tendrils of tiny vines and grasses to begin to poke their way in.

Melody surveyed the doors, then took hold of the one that was not skewed and turned the handle, pulling inwards. It stuck a bit, but came open after a few moments, letting the light seep in.

The morning was still overcast, though it seemed that there was a faint haze in the air of the courtyard - fog, not smoke. The air was chilly. Sabrina was glad for the jacket she was wearing.

“Wow, this is gorgeous,” Melody said, stepping out into the open. “It smells great here.”

The air was heavy with the scents of moisture and decaying wood, and the rich smell of fertile earth and growing plants. Sabrina spotted several insects darting through the grass and even the heavy, dew-beaded strands of a spiderweb trailing across one of the windows facing inwards.

She pulled out her camera, and together she and Melody got a few beautiful shots of the courtyard from various locations. It was much quieter than the day before. Where there had been birdsong the previous afternoon, there was now only the soft sounds of wind, and the occasional chirp or squawk in the distant treetops.

Partway though the session, though, Sabrina began to feel uneasy, as if something were watching her. She cast her gaze up towards the various windows, staring as they were like dead eyes down into the courtyard.

Melody caught her looking. “What is it?” she asked, following Sabrina’s gaze up towards a dark square.

Sabrina shivered. “I don’t know. I just - I’m… this is gonna sound stupid, but I feel like any minute I’m going to look up and see someone in one of those windows, watching me.”

“...well, now _I’m_ scared of that,” Melody said, with a frown. “Why’d you have to say that?”

“You asked!”

They wrapped up the courtyard shots, loathe to lose the natural light but no longer willing to stand under the scrutiny of the windows. Sabrina kept thinking of that strange, wavering figure in the hall, and threw many glances back towards the door they’d come through.

Nothing made an appearance.

The two reporters stowed their cameras, Sabrina in her backpack, Melody in the side-slung camera bag she’d brought with her. “Where to next?” she asked, once they were done.

There was an old wood and iron bench half-choked by weeds that they’d gotten a few pictures of; Sabrina crouched next to it and leaned on the rotting planks, pulling out her phone. “Uh,” she said, and brought up the map of the Asylum from above. “I… suppose one of the other buildings might work. There’s two, the asylum building and the dormitory.”

“I kind of want to say save the asylum for later. Best for last, y’know?”

“Yeah, I agree. Dormitory first. I doubt there’ll be that much there.” Sabrina paused. “We can definitely do a melancholy spin on that one, I think. Sort of a ‘what was once here’ vibe, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think that’ll do. Maybe we’ll find some little kid ghosts there!”

“Mel, that was the _worst_ thing you could’ve said.”

“It super wasn’t. I could have s -”

_“Mel. Please.”_

Melody laughed. “Alright, alright,” she said, “I’ll leave you alone. To the dorms?”

“God, it’s like college all over again.”

They headed to the back of the courtyard, where they found another door leading into the building. It was a relatively simple affair to move back through and out the rear of the hall, which was just as stately and composed - and decayed - as the front had been.

At first, stepping out onto the leaf-littered ground, Sabrina thought she’d gotten something wrong. She didn’t see any other buildings - there were supposed to be two, where were they? - but after a few moments she studied the ground and realized there were two strips of pavement stretching away from the rear door, one to her left and one to her right, out at diagonal angles.

“Oh,” she said, “those must lead to the other buildings.”

“What?”

Sabrina pointed out the roads. They _were_ roads, as far as she could tell, definitely large enough for a vehicle if they’d had one back here. She wondered for a moment if she’d be able to bring the car around to the back here, but a quick glance at the trees that crowded the non-paved forest floor told her she wouldn’t.

It looked like they’d have to walk a bit to their next destination. Sabrina glanced down at her map again, unlocking her phone with a few practiced swipes. It didn’t _quite_ seem to match up with what she was seeing… but then again, the satellite photos were old, and she couldn’t trust them exactly. She shook her head with a sigh. “Um, going by this… the dorms are off to our left, which would be the, uh… the east, since we’re facing south. And the asylum is to the right. The west.”

“East it is,” Melody said. She unbuckled her mask behind her head and lowered it, taking a deep breath. “Whoof, it’s nice not to be wearing that thing for a little bit.”

“We can do that?”

“Oh, yeah! We’re not inside. Nothing in the air of the forest here can hurt us, it’s all just dirt and plants and stuff. Unless there’s, like, radioactivity here? But I super doubt that.”

Sabrina pulled her own mask down, relieved to feel the cool air on her face. She tapped her fingernails thoughtfully on the plastic. “Hey, did you pick anything up on any of the instruments?”

“Oh, let me check.” Melody swung her bag off and set it down on the damp ground, then dug out the various gadgets she’d left running. “Nothing too impressive… some minor changes in temperature, nothing on the EMF. Actually… this is a totally normal readout.” She frowned at it. “There should’ve been at least _something_ from the, um, the thing we saw yesterday. I mean, I guess there wouldn’t have to be, but… kind of weird.”

“We’ll have to check again later,” Sabrina said. Without thinking she turned to look back at the doorway behind them, half-expecting to see nothing, half-expecting to see that strange figure there again.

There was nothing, no one. She searched the darkness for a few seconds, then shook her head, dismissing the feeling, and turned back to the misty forest and roads. “We should go,” she said.

“Yeah, let’s.” Melody packed most of her stuff into her bag, but kept the EMF detector out. “This bad boy’s staying in my hands, though.”

Sabrina nodded. That was fair. She pulled out her smaller camera, a Polaroid - everyone knew that old cameras could photograph ghosts better than new ones, which would just digitally distort the images into an unrecognizable mess half the time. If something came up on them, well… she’d be ready.

She stepped off the back porch and down onto the wet ground, then headed to the left, towards the dormitories, on a long walk winding through the woods. Melody followed her.

Though they left the administration building and its blank, staring windows behind, Sabrina couldn’t shake the unease that clung to her skin like the mist that swirled around her. She shivered and hurried onwards.


	5. The Dormitory

Mist, trees, leaves, grass, dirt, asphalt. Sabrina found her mind wandering as she walked, lulling her into an almost dreamlike state.

The road was surprisingly even for how old it had to be, with very few cracks. The only thing that betrayed its decay was the layer of leaves that lay atop it, rotting gently into the blacktop.

The only sounds were their footsteps and the gentle clicking of the EMF detector, peering through the fog with its electronic eyes. Sabrina kept spotting strange shapes in the haze, but they were always just leaves or branches or, once, a particularly large stone.

The path seemed strangely long, longer than she’d expected, but it was still a surprise when she saw the dark windows and pillared entryway of another building emerge from the trees. “Oh, there it is,” she commented, and almost regretted speaking; her voice fell dead in the air, and Melody shot her a look that was almost irritated, as if she’d transgressed by choosing to break the silence.

The dormitory was built differently from the Administration and Teaching Hall, longer and… lower, somehow, though it actually had more floors. The windows were spaced further apart than those in the Administration building, and seemed grayer, almost as if they were frosted.

“Try the front door?” Melody suggested, as she settled her mask back over her face. Sabrina stepped forwards and took hold of the handle, but the little lever on the top didn’t push down.

“Locked,” Sabrina reported, stepping back. “We’ll need another door.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

Absolutely wrong. Sabrina and Melody spent twenty minutes searching for another way into the building and couldn’t find one; there was only one way in and one way out.

“Not much for fire safety, these folks,” Melody murmured, when they both stood in front of the door again.

“Apparently not. How…?”

Melody glanced at the nearby windows. “We could try finding some broken panes to poke through,” she said, “or just one that’s not locked.”

“We really aren’t supposed to do any actual breaking, just entering,” Sabrina countered, with a frown. “I mean - really, we’re not.”

“I know, but we have to get inside somehow, right? Besides, there’s no  _ way _ a place like this still has all its windows intact. It’s been abandoned for ages.”

“Despite having no actual records of being shut down or having its services at all limited,” Sabrina muttered.

“The records were probably just lost, Sabi.”

Yes. That was likely it. Sabrina knew it was true, but she just… couldn’t understand it. Something about the situation just seemed  _ wrong _ to her.

Melody cleared her throat. “You… good?”

“Hm? Oh. Yeah. How do we get in?”

“Broken panes,” Melody repeated. “I’m gonna break one of the windows.”

“Uh, that’s - do we have to?”

“Probably, but if you want to look again for another way in, you totally can,” Melody said, with a shrug. “I’ll get in here while you go around…?”

“Should we really split up? I mean, what if something happens?”

“Then we’ve got these.” Melody slung her backpack off one shoulder, unzipped it, and pulled out one of the set of walkie-talkies she’d brought along. She pulled it out, clicked the button to test it, and handed it over to Sabrina. “Just call through this and it should come over to me loud and clear. I’ll be on channel… uh, how about channel…” she paused, squinting at the screen. “Wow, there’s a lot of channels on this thing. I don’t even really know what these numbers mean. Um, how about channel 465.4?”

Sabrina clicked her walkie-talkie push-to-talk button a few times, listening to the static crackle out of Melody’s receiver. “Right,” she said, “okay. I guess… I guess that’ll work.”

“Listen, we’ll be in the same building. Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

“ _ Please _ don’t say that.”

Melody rolled her eyes. “Not to spit in the face of superstition, but there have been plenty of times where I  _ haven’t _ said that and it’s all gone south anyways, and plenty of times where I  _ have _ and everything’s been fine. There’s no correlation there.”

“If you say so.”

“I mean it! You’ll be fine. Um, do you want to go looking for a door while I head through a window?” Melody tapped her fingernails - shiny, painted - on the exterior of the walkie-talkie and surveyed the dorm’s grimy windows with a critical eye. “I know you’re not into the whole popping the first floor glass idea.”

“I’m really not.” Sabrina paused. “Though, I guess… who would report us, out here? Nobody’s around. As far as we know.”

“See, now  _ you’re _ the one spooking  _ me _ with that,” Melody said over her shoulder, already moving towards the nearest window. “‘As far as we know.’ The last thing I need is to be worried about other people out here! It’s bad enough with the ghosts.”

“Ghost, singular. We’ve only seen one.”

“So far!”

Sabrina shook her head and split off, heading along the building’s wall. “I’ll go looking for an open window,” she said. “I’m just not a fan of broken glass.”

“Suit yourself.” Melody glanced over the ground. “Oh, this rock will do.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing that.”

“Go find one that opens! Stop judging me!”

The musical crash of shattering glass seemed oddly muffled in the hazy fog, and while Sabrina thought perhaps that might’ve made her feel better about being detected, the dampening of the sound only served to unnerve her further. It was almost as if something were deliberately softening Melody’s impact on the world, covering it up.

_ I shouldn’t leave her. I shouldn’t leave her alone. _

Sabrina stopped in place and turned, looking back. Melody had tossed a rock through the window and was now standing on her tiptoes, squinting at the glass that was left, which was just a little bit above her eye level. She seemed to be determining if she needed to break more.

“Melody,” Sabrina called, “maybe we ought to stick together.”

“Huh? No, we have the radios! We’ll be fine.”

Against her better judgement, Sabrina pivoted again and continued along the outer wall of the building. Behind her, she heard Melody jump, and mutter to herself as she thunked against the wooden paneling and wriggled her way through the window, into the building.

After a few moments, the sounds faded, and there was silence as Sabrina walked forwards. She glanced around at the woods, but the air held a faint white tinge to it now, and it was hard to see more than a few hundred meters in any direction. She didn’t like that. Something about it made her uneasy.

The silence pressed on her ears like water at the bottom of a pool, making them thrum. When her walkie-talkie squawked, Sabrina physically jumped, startled.

“Hey!” Melody’s voice called, from Sabrina’s belt, made scratchy and staticky by the walkie-talkie. “I’m in! Did you find anything yet?”

“I just left you,” Sabrina said.

“It’s been a few minutes, I thought I’d ask.”

“Uh, no. I haven’t.”

There was a heavy  _ thunk _ as Sabrina stepped on something wooden, or rather, as her foot caught on it. She tripped forwards but windmilled her arms enough to avoid falling.

When she regained her footing, she turned, peering down into the grass at what had caught her. “Scratch that,” she said, holding the walkie-talkie up to her face. “I did find something. I don’t like this, though.” 

“What is it?”

“Looks like an old cellar door.”

“Did we miss that on the walkaround earlier? How?”

“It’s not really easy to see,” Sabrina argued, with a shrug. The grass was up to her knees; the wooden frame of the cellar hatch was buried in the long strands. “I guess we just overlooked it. It’s covered in leaves, and - oh, ew, a weird mold.”

“Ooh, what color?”

“Uh, white? Why does that - gross?”

“Just curious. You know, black mold is dangerous.”

“Well, that’s why we have the masks.” Sabrina hooked her radio onto her belt and pulled her mask up, breathing in one last long breath of fresh air before settling the plastic and rubber back over her nose and mouth. “To protect from that kind of thing. Um, I think  _ specifically _ for black mold and asbestos. Right?”

“Yep. Those are the cartridges.”

“Yeah.” Sabrina stepped closer to the cellar hatch and squinted at it. “This… isn’t locked. That’s weird.”

“That’s  _ lucky, _ you mean,” Melody said. “Make sure you get a photograph of that before you touch it!”

“Oh. Right.” Sabrina stepped back, slung her backpack off her shoulder, and pulled out her camera. It took a few minutes of fiddling, but she pulled out her Canon and took a few photographs of the cellar door from various angles. One of them she caught in a moment of brightness, and figured she could probably edit some sunshine into one or two of them if necessary. She also, however, snapped a few slightly off-kilter shots that threw the entire image - the white and gray cinder bricks of the wall and the pale ash window frames, the door buried in the grasses, lurking up against the wall - into an unnerving, unsafe mood.

“Got them,” she reported, to Melody. “Find anything?”

“I went upstairs and found a portion where the roof collapsed in. This place is definitely hella abandoned. I can’t get down the hallway, though.”

“Upstairs! Mel -”

“I know, I  _ know, _ it’s not safe. I… don’t really have an excuse, I just thought there might be something interesting up here.”

“Well, be  _ careful!” _

“I am! I am. You’ll hear if anything goes wrong, trust me!”

“Try not to let anything go wrong in the first place?”

“I’ll do my best. Relax, Sabi, it’s not my first time doing this.”

Sabrina knew she was right, and reluctantly let off the push-to-talk button of her radio, hooking it back into her belt. Melody knew what she was doing. She was experienced, good at her job, and had done multiple pieces in buildings worse off than this one. Still, Sabrina felt… oddly worried about her.

_ It’s just this place. It’s kind of creepy. _

Of course it was creepy. It was haunted, and rotting, and empty. She shivered.

Well, no more sense in putting it off. Sabrina stowed her camera away in her backpack, then slung it back on her shoulders and stepped to the cellar. IT wasn’t locked, just latched with a heavy iron paddle and a chunk of metal run through it, and Sabrina easily pulled the two apart and gave the door an experimental tug. It was heavy, ubt not too heavy for her to lift. She did so with a grunt and tugged it out of the ground.

It came up in a shower of dirt and the tearing of grass roots, ripped apart from where they’d started to creep over the old wood. Sabrina squinted into the darkness, then heaved the cellar door all the way up, as far as it would go. Unfortunately, given its position next to the wall and facing outwards to the forest, it wouldn’t stay open on its own.

“No,” she said aloud, staring at the steps that led down into the darkness. “I’m not getting trapped in there. No goddamn way.”

Sabrina set the door back down and turned towards the forest. There had to be a fallen branch in here somewhere that she could use to prop the door up, that was certain. She spent a few minutes poking about in the leaves, searching for anything that would work, and eventually came up with a large, heavy branch, probably a good four feet long.

“This’ll do,” she said, nodding at it. She took it back to the cellar, lifted the door, and stepped in, swallowing nervously as she went. The air that rushed up from the depths was cool and damp, staler than the air out in the fog, and Sabrina tried to ignore the chills it gave her as she turned and wedged the branch into the corner of the first stairstep. It stuck, and she positioned the other end against the door’s interior, setting it ajar.

Then, for good measure, she took a smaller stick from nearby and placed it across the open corner of the cellar. If her large branch failed, and the door fell down, the small stick should at least stop it from shutting completely. In theory. Hopefully.

Why was she fussing about with the door so much? It wasn’t like it was going to get knocked down by a person or an animal. It wasn’t like a ghost was going to shut the door on her.

“Why did I think that to myself,” Sabrina sighed, suddenly afraid that a ghost was going to shut the door on her. “I’m stupid.”

With that, she turned and faced into the darkness. She’d put a flashlight in her jacket pocket, and pulled it out now - a thin silver thing, startlingly bright and strong. She’d gotten it on clearance at a hardware store. Now she thanked herself for that as she clicked the button on and shone it into the darkness.

The steps continued downwards for a short time until they opened into a small room. Sabrina warily followed them and shone the light around, and was surprised to find, after a few moments, that she was looking at the interior of a washing room. For laundry, it seemed.

There were a few racks of old, moldering towels and sheets, folded neatly and sitting against the walls or in the center of the room, taking up about half of it. Along the wall were metallic troughs and bins. Clearly this had been a large operation at one point, and it had been a point in time before washing machines had become a thing.

“This place is ancient,” Sabrina muttered. She didn’t know when washing machines had been invented, but she was pretty sure it was over a hundred years ago. Probably. Maybe?

She reached down and unclipped her radio. “I’m in,” she said, holding down the trigger. “I’m in a basement. Looks like they did laundry down here?”

“Any lights?”

“Nope. Just me and my flashlight.”

“Spooky.”

“Mel!”

A laugh from the other end. “Sorry, sorry. Is there anything interesting down there?”

“Not really?” Sabrina glanced around, shining the flashlight everywhere she looked. “Uhh, just a lot of old towels and blankets.”

“Still there?” Melody thought for a moment. “That’s… odd.”

“It feels weird to me, too, but I’m not sure why.”

“Because if it were liquidated, shut down, you know,” Melody said, “then they would’ve taken a bunch of the stuff out of here. Equipment, towels, gear, etc. Sold it off, maybe? It doesn’t matter. The point is they would have sold it and gotten rid of it, not just left it down there. You  _ should  _ be looking at an empty basement.”

“Except this place was never shut down,” Sabrina said, her throat tight. “I  _ told _ you -!”

“Okay, okay, I believe you now,” Melody said, with a sigh. “I didn’t think that made any sense before, because who wouldn’t want this gigantic mansion and estate? And who’s been upkeeping the lawns? The city? Don’t make me laugh. Trakewood can’t afford to upkeep its own streets, much less the lawn of a giant asylum that isn’t even really part of the city.”

“It’s not?”

“No. You remember, right? In one of the links you sent me?”

Sabrina frowned. She’d skimmed them, but hadn’t taken the time to read the articles and pages on Trakewood Asylum in any further detail than she’d needed to, in order to get through them all. “Uhh…. humor me, and say that I just want a refresher.”

“Hah. Okay. Well, the Asylum isn’t actually part of Trakewood. It has the name, but the city’s police can’t even go on the grounds. It’s not legal. IT’s technically its own city, sort of? I don’t really know how to explain it. But it’s only on its own grounds, under its own jurisdiction. Totally under its own rules.”

“This may be a stupid question, but it’s still part of Ohio, right? It’s part of the USA?”

“Oh, probably. It didn’t say anything about that. I assume if the President came to Trakewood for whatever god-forsaken reason he’d be able to enter it safely, because nobody’s going to say no to the President. And because it’s technically America. Probably.”

“Right.”

Sabrina shone her light around again. “This is really weird. So, um, its own city and everything. Why wouldn’t someone buy this…? If it ever went up for sale?”

“Too expensive, maybe. Another reason they should’ve liquidated the materials and everything inside. Make it less pricey. No, you were right. There’s no shutdown date because I don’t think this place ever did shut down. It just kind of died.”

A moment of silence. Sabrina swallowed, suddenly aware that the only thing between her and total stillness and darkness was her flashlight. “Yikes,” she said, just to say something at all. “Uh, I want out of this basement.”

“Fair. See if you can find an exit.”

“There’d better be one! I really doubt the only way into the cellar is from the outside. The laundry room.”

“Probably not the case, yeah.”

Sabrina hooked the radio back onto her belt and sighed, then headed to the wall of the room and started to make a circuit. It wasn’t a massive room, so it took her only a few moments to locate the doorway, across from the cellar entrance, that led to a flight of stairs going up. Mercifully, she could see light diffusing through the thick air somewhere near the top.

_ Good enough, _ Sabrina thought, and headed up the stairs.

As she climbed, that cool, damp, clear feel to the air faded, replaced with a dry dusty smell like… well, like an old house. Sabrina opened the door at the top of the stairs and blinked in the sudden brightness.

She was inside the dormitory, though she wasn’t sure exactly where in the building she was. The doorway opened into a long hall, with several windows that looked in and cast a dim, ambient light on the wall she was facing, and Sabrina frowned - had she gone all the way underneath the dormitory, emerging on the far side? That must be it.

Reaching down, Sabrina pulled her walkie-talkie off her belt again. “I’m on the ground floor,” she said, into the receiver. “I’m on the other side of the building from where you went in, though. I didn’t think the basement was that big?”

No response. Sabrina glanced down, sure she’d let go of the button, and yes, there was just nothing coming through. She checked the channel. 465.4. She pressed the switch down again. “Uh, Melody?”

Nothing. Sabrina felt an inkling of worry grow in her throat, and looked up, down the hallway, then down the other direction.

Melody was standing there, in the hallway, looking at her. Sabrina jumped, then closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Jesus, Mel,” she said, letting out a breath and listening to her heart thunder in her ears. “You scared me so bad…”

Silence. Sabrina felt a sudden tingle on her skin, like static electricity, like the ocean-deep knowledge of something being off, and she knew if she looked up, whatever it was, she would see it. The fear that spilled through her lungs and veins then made her freeze up, wide-eyed and staring at the floor, until she managed to force herself to raise her head. The muscles in her neck screamed against the attempt; her heartbeat flickered like a dying lightbulb.

Melody was just a few feet from her. She hadn’t moved; it looked like she’d simply become closer somehow, without walking, or changing position. She was staring directly at Sabrina - through her, maybe, at something behind? The expression on her face reminded Sabrina of her eyes when she’d seen the ghost in the Administration building’s lobby. One of her hands was in a position where she seemed to be about to raise it, and her mouth was ever so slightly open. Sabrina watched her eyes slowly, glacially move, sliding from staring  _ towards _ Sabrina to staring  _ at _ her, at the point just at the top of her nose, the rest of her body utterly still.

“M-” Sabrina managed to choke out, paralyzed. The movement continued; her eyes slid downwards, to the bottom of her eyesight, and then the irises slid out of sight, leaving only the whites of her eyes showing. Sabrina wanted to scream. Melody’s image shivered ever so slightly, like an out-of-sequence television shot, and then simply vanished, out of existence.

But Sabrina still couldn’t move. She found her muscles locked in place, and more than anything, suddenly, she wanted to turn around. She couldn’t turn around. She wanted to turn around. She wanted so, so badly, and she couldn’t turn -

Something brushed against her cheek, just the faintest little graze. The touch was delicate, soft, like a curl of wind or a soft breath more than the touch of any object. Was this what a ghost felt like? Sabrina wanted to howl and wail and claw at her own skin to get rid of it, wanted to push herself  _ away _ from this thing, whatever it was. She blinked, feeling tears well up, fear pushing up through her throat and spilling from her eyes.

And then it was gone, and Sabrina could move.

She whirled in place and threw herself against the wall, away from anything that could have been behind her. There was nothing there, of course. She stared at the empty air, mouth ajar, hands pressed against the wood of the hallway’s panelling, her heart struggling like a captive insect.

“What,” she managed, terrified.

Her walkie-talkie gave off a screech of static, and she jumped so badly that she caught her backpack on the wall and tripped herself. This time, she couldn’t balance, and fell onto the floor, which was wood with a long and well-worn rug running down the center. She yelped as she went down.

“-ere, Sabi?” came Melody’s voice, concerned and ordinary, through the radio. “You, uh, called for me. I answered, but you’re awfully quiet down there.”

Sabrina lay there for a second before rolling over to press her back against the wall. She didn’t want to have her back to  _ anything _ now. With numb hands, she grabbed for the radio and brought it up. “Hi,” she said, trying to control the trembling of her voice. “I, um, no, yeah, I…”

“...Sabi, are you, like, good?”

“No,” Sabrina replied, trying not to cry. “What the fuck. This place is haunted and I hate it a lot.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Melody said, voice going serious. “What happened? Talk to me.”

Sabrina took a deep breath and calmed herself. It was one ghost. Just one ghost, and it hadn’t even touched her. It had just looked at her!

With Melody’s eyes.

She let her breath out, feeling it catch in her throat, scrape on her teeth. “I, uh,” she said, and took another.

“Jesus. Where are you?” Melody asked. “I’ll come to you.”

“I’m okay, I’m not hurt,” Sabrina automatically said, and sniffed. “I, um, there was a ghost and it had your face on.”

Melody went quiet.

“It stood at the end of the hallway, then got really close to me and I couldn’t move, and it, um… it did some weird stuff with your eyes. And then it left. It - it didn’t touch me.” Sabrina raised a hand to the side of her face, touching the spot where that faintest whisper had brushed over her skin. Her cheek was cold to the touch, colder than her clammy fingertips, and numb. “I’m fine. Just… just a little scared.”

“It had my  _ face?” _ Melody said, stunned.

“Y-yeah.”

“...shit,” she said.

“I… yeah, that’s - that’s what I thought. Should we really…?”

“Let’s call Chris. I want some opinions on this one, from the outside.”

“Good idea. Do you wanna, or -”

“I’ll do it. Stay - where are you again?”

“Uh… in - in a hallway, on the far side of the building from where you came in. Um. There’s windows looking outside. I’m halfway down it, I think….?”

“Okay. Right. Well, stay where you are, in some sunlight if there is any, and make sure your protective charms are on display.”

“R-right. I will.”

Sabrina let her hand fall, and pulled herself up to sit with her back to the wall. She took a few more deep breaths and finally felt her fear begin to ebb away.

“That was messed up,” she said, quietly, to herself.

As the minutes went by, though, she began to calm. The ghost hadn’t hurt her. And it had… well, it had  _ maybe _ touched her. But that hadn’t hurt or anything, just been… a little scary. Sabrina snorted.  _ A little scary. _ She was pretty sure that was the worst thing she’d encountered so far in her career as a paranormal investigator.

She tipped her head back against the wall, then pulled her backpack off and pulled her camera out. The hallway was empty, hazy towards the far end with dust, and Sabrina snapped a photo from her position. It wasn’t going to be the best photo, but she’d be damned if she was going to stand up without anybody to watch her back right now. She could already see the photo in print.  _ Caption: Got psychologically assaulted by a ghost in this hallway. It stole my co-worker's face and touched my cheek. _ She paused, frowning.  _ Tried to touch my cheek. _

Sabrina lapsed into silent thought. The hallway was cold, if dry. She pushed herself up the wall slightly and peeked around the corner of the window, feeling a jolt of fear that she’d see something horrible through the glass, but all she saw outside was the forest, hazy with fog. She slid back down and settled her wrists on her knees.

By God, she didn’t want to be alone right now. She urged Melody to hurry up, wherever she was.

As if summoned, she heard noise at the far end of the hallway, and looked in that direction. A figure appeared there - Melody, from the looks of it.

For a moment, when she saw the other woman, Sabrina instinctively moved away from her, frantically scooting backwards. But a moment passed and she saw Melody moving, pushing her hair out of her face, and she calmed her panicked pulse and swallowed her fear.

“Melody,” she called, and felt a flood of relief when Melody’s gaze snapped to her. “Over here.”

“Yes! Okay, thank God,” Melody said, and hurried towards her, eyes wide. “Sabi, are you okay? That sounded - you’re so pale, oh my God. Maybe we should go.”

“No.” Sabrina shook her head. “No. I - I’m fine, really. I can - I just got really scared. It was stupid of me to call you all the way over here, honestly.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Melody said, her gaze level. “You don’t mess around with ghosts, trust me. I’d rather stick with you if I can.”

That was… unexpected. Sabrina blinked. “Oh,” she said. “...alright.”

“Unless you don’t w -”

“No,  _ please, _ yes.” Sabrina cut her off with an emphatic gesture. “I don’t… I want someone else around.”

“I get that. I’ve had some pretty bad ghost scares in the past.” Melody extended a hand; Sabrina took it, and Melody pulled her up with surprising strength. “I understand.”

Sabrina shuddered for a second, then shook the feeling off. “Thanks,” she muttered. “I… yeah. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. Should we just, like, look around here, then? I’ll stick with you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, probably a good idea.”

“Cool.” Melody clapped her hands together, and the sound was ever so slightly muffled. “Let’s get going! Why are all these rooms facing away from the windows? The people staying here, who were  _ all _ kids as far as I know from the articles, wouldn’t be able to see outside.”

“Because the people who ran this place were insane?” Sabrina suggested, shakily. “That’s just my opinion, not based in any facts.”

Melody snorted. “You could be right. They did after all keep children in the middle of nowhere next to a building they used as an insane asylum, and those got used to house, like, tuberculosis and syphilis patients half the time in ye olden days, so.”

“Got  _ what? _ ”

“Syphilis makes you insane sometimes. But, not permanently. Only if it isn’t treated. But guess what never got treated in insane asylums?”

“Wild.”

Melody sighed fondly. “Ah, old medicine, where they just put people in buildings and tried not to think about them too much. No wonder this place is haunted. Let’s go find some stuff to photograph.”

“Right. Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr is dragonsateyourtoast


	6. The Diary of Leroy Cooke

The rooms did face inwards, away from the hall and the outside of the building. Contrary to Melody’s deductions, though, they did have windows - facing inwards.

“This building has a courtyard, too?” Sabrina said, puzzled, as they entered the first one.

“What kind of dorm has a courtyard?” Melody asked, and sighed. “I wish my dorm had had a courtyard.”

“Would you have gone in it?”

“Probably not, but it might’ve given all the stoners somewhere to smoke that wasn’t the rooms that shared their ventilation system with mine.”

Sabrina snorted. “Okay, fair enough.” She peered out the window, which was scummed over with gray dust and cobwebs. It seemed to be slightly inset into the wall, the very edges of her field of view blocked by the building, and looked out over a slice of completely untamed forest. It couldn’t be that large of a courtyard, but there were full-sized trees standing between her and anything else she could see, and she couldn’t see through them to check if there were windows on the other side. Additionally, the air outside was even hazier, as if the light fog that had started to filter through the woods had thickened.

“Pretty out there,” Melody said, joining Sabrina by the small window. “Kind of melancholy, though.”

“This whole place is. When it’s not being, you know, creepy as all hell.”

“I mean, that’s a given, yeah.”

The room was small, just a little bit uncomfortable. It was clear there had once been curtains over the window, but they’d fallen off a time ago, and now lay in a damp, mildewed heap on the floor next to the wall. There was a bed, oddly high up off the ground, with a set of drawers underneath it. On the other side of the room - only a meter and a half, perhaps two meters away from the bed - was a wooden desk and a chair. The chair was neatly tucked in underneath the desk, the drawers all shut.

“This room sucks, no offense,” Melody stated, flatly. “I would hate to live here.”

“I don’t know,” Sabrina said, glancing around. It was lit from the window, a soft gray light that caught on the walls. “It’s kind of peaceful.”

“I guess, but yeesh. Can’t see anybody else. I thought it might be fun to wave at people through your window, but it won’t be if you can’t see them. Lame.”

Sabrina pulled her camera out and stepped back, aiming it at the window. The trees beyond it made for a nice photo framed by the decaying white wood, and though it wasn’t anything they didn’t already have given the shots she’d gotten in the administration building.

Systematically, Sabrina and Melody began to move through the rooms on the ground floor. They were all mostly identical, a single bed and a desk and some curtains that had usually fallen to the floor. Some of the rooms were messier than others, more decayed, but none of them were impassable.

“These beds,” Sabrina said, in their eighth room. “They’re all made. What’s up with that?”

“Maybe when it… nah, it never shut down. I guess the kids who stayed here were neat and made their stuff up when they left or something.”

“Where did they go? This place didn’t officially shut down.”

“Probably went home for the summer,” Melody said, with a shrug. “Do boarding schools close in the summer? Or, like, send the kids home?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Probably something we should know. I’d look it up, but… that’s not gonna fly.” Melody held her phone up with a sigh, glanced at it, and put it back in her pocket.

Sabrina blinked. “That reminds me,” she said, stunned that she’d somehow forgotten about this. “Did you call Chris?”

“I  _ tried _ to. Didn’t work. There’s absolutely no service up here.” Melody’s expression was troubled. “Don’t really… like that a whole lot.”

“No, neither do I.” Sabrina pulled her own phone out, but just as Melody had reported, in place of the signal indicator there was a simple “1G” symbol, grayed out and with a line through it. “Same here, with my phone… maybe we should go.”

“...maybe.” Melody sighed. “I was hoping we would find… I don’t know something...”

She trailed off. Sabrina glanced over, and saw her poking through a couple of crumpled papers that lay over each other on the desk. Her face was caught in an expression somewhere between wonder and confusion, her mouth ever so slightly open. “Mel?” Sabrina said, turning fully towards her. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, just… look at this. There’s writing on these. I can almost read it, let me just light it up -”

Melody broke off, scrabbling in her bag. She came up with a small flashlight and clicked it on, aiming its beam down at the paper. Sabrina stepped over and leaned down, squinting at the paper.

“Something something something… ‘strange,’” Melody said, and her face lit up. “Oh  _ boy! _ Let’s see here…”

Sabrina took one of the pages Melody wasn’t looking at and slid it across the desk, narrowing her eyes at it. “‘Unlikely to find another soul out there,’” she read, frowning.

“Oh? Read it aloud.” Melody pulled out her own camera, high-quality video, and started recording. “Go on.”

She felt rather silly doing it, but nevertheless, Sabrina cleared her throat and held the paper up, still squinting her eyes as if that made the faded writing any clearer. “Alright. This says… okay, this is talking about, as far as I can tell, someone’s experiences here. It doesn’t say who - I don’t see, I don’t see a name anywhere -”

“What’s it  _ say, _ though!”

“I’m getting there! Hold your horses.” Sabrina coughed lightly and began. “Something something ‘unlikely to find another soul out there… strange days and nights surrounded by this ever-unchanging woodland. The seasons do pass, but it feels…’ I can’t read it for another few lines, it’s too smeared. But it goes on to say things like, um, like ‘winter’s grasp is hardly seen through the fog’ and ‘unbeknownst to us we were -’”

She stopped, staring at it.

“What? What’s it say?”

Sabrina read over the line a few times, feeling her facial expression change to something more akin to horror. She looked up at the camera lens a few times, trying to figure out what the hell this could  _ possibly _ mean. “‘Unbeknownst to us we are all fuel for the creature that this place is,’” she said, and lowered the paper slightly. “What the  _ hell?” _

“Uh, I’m gonna second  _ that _ sentiment,” Melody said, sounding rather subdued. “I don’t - I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I. What’s your sheet say?”

“Here.” melody handed it over, trying not to shake the camera’s view too much. The Eyewitness Weekly was primarily online, and the video had a good chance of making it up onto the site. Sabrina took it and scanned the words.

“This one’s in worse shape than the last, but I can make out a few sentences here and there,” she said. “There’s another mention of, um… of fog…”

She trailed off and glanced out the window. Melody followed her gaze with the camera, and they both looked out over the courtyard with its tall trees and masking branches and leaves. Filtering through them now was that same white haze, and it seemed… stronger than it had before. Thicker. Was it getting foggier?

“Er - there also is the word ‘strange’ in here, and… let’s see. ‘...feels very strange, almost as if…’ something something something, ‘in the depths of my mind something as if I no longer want to walk beyond the gates.’ I… okay, I don’t know what this means, but like, I’m gonna officially say I’m really unsettled by this.”

She said it for the camera, but as she spoke the words aloud, they seemed to fall into a soft, thick silence and vanish, and she felt the thin tendrils of fog whisper across her skin like fingers, and shivered involuntarily.

“Same  _ hat, _ ” Melody said, fervently, apparently not seeing Sabrina’s physical unease. “That’s freakin’  _ creepy. _ Are you sure this building is the dorm and not the, uh, asylum?”

“Absolutely certain. I think we wouldn’t find the rooms in as neat a condition if this were the asylum.”

“Right, right… Jesus Christ.” Melody shook her head, but kept the camera perfectly still. “Anything else on that page?”

“No, it looks like it’s mostly been mucked up by a water stain,” Sabrina said, with a sigh. She glanced at the desk. “Any more?”

“Uhh… yeah, one.”

Sabrina reached past her and picked up the last paper, frowning at it. “Oh, this one has a few complete sentences! Let’s see here.”

Melody waited patiently while Sabrina read them over, watching her carefully, her dark brown eyes immeasurable. Whatever was in them, Sabrina couldn’t decipher it.

“Alright,” Sabrina said, swallowing. “This is - hey, uh, this is actually super disturbing.”

“Ooh, hit me.”

“No, like, I think maybe we should call the police?”

“Oh.” Melody paused. “Well, how old is this? I don’t think whatever’s written there is going to matter  _ now.” _

“I… well, all the same.”

“Just read it out! We’ll decide after.”

Sabrina held up a hand. “Alright, alright. Fine.” She cleared her throat. “‘It’s late spring, early summer, which is of course when the fevers start to turn the minds of those who have less will. I’m afraid this means it will be Jack Henry’s last semester at the school before he’s finally moved over to the asylum. I wondered how long it would take him. He lasted longer than most like him, and I really do admire that in someone. Since he won’t let go, though, I know he’ll be transferred. You have to learn how to let go. With something like that weighing you down, you can’t move forwards. I suppose some people just don’t understand. It’s not as if…’” she paused, shaking her head. “That’s the end of the page. There’s probably more, or… was probably more at some point. Mel, I really - that doesn’t sound like something a normal boarding school would do! From the sound of it, this… Jack Henry, right, this Jack Henry kid - because I’m  _ certain _ these are kids no matter  _ how _ bizarre they sound - got shunted into the asylum because of some weird, arbitrary circumstance about his past. Because he couldn’t ‘let go’ or something.” She dropped her hands, the page in them, and stared at nothing. “I don’t like this, Mel. I really, really don’t.”

“Y’know, maybe I don’t either, now that I really mull this one over,” Melody said. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Just maybe.” Sabrina swallowed. “Is, I mean, can we figure out who Jack Henry was? Something about the tone of this - and, listen, I don’t know  _ what _ it is, but  _ something _ about it just… it just makes me think that once you go  _ in _ to the asylum, you are not going to come back out again.”

“No, yeah, I get that too?” Melody agreed, her voice squeaking upwards at the end of her statement. “Though I think it’s probably gonna be pretty difficult to figure out the whereabouts of somebody named  _ Jack Henry. _ You couldn’t make a more generic name if you tried. Well, maybe John Smith.”

“Not the point.”

“Right, yeah.”

Sabrina glanced down at the paper. It was moldering slightly around the edges, faint hints of green and brown creeping over the cream and white. The paper crinkled where water had warped it out of shape. She turned it over, half-expecting to see some kind of horrifying face or creature drawn on the back. There was nothing of the sort - it was blank.

“Okay, yeah,” she said, and set the paper back on the desk. “You know what? I think we - I think we’ve got enough, um, enough evidence for now. We should leave, sort through this, and see if Chris wants any more.”

“But the asylum,” Melody said, plaintively, as she stopped the recording on the quality camera and settled it carefully back in her bag, strapping it in place. “What about the asylum building?”

“I almost don’t  _ want _ to go in there.”

“Sabi, we can’t leave without looking at it!”

Sabrina knew she was right. And she  _ wanted _ to know about it,  _ wanted _ to see inside, to uncover whatever ghosts it held roaming and listless in its hallways. She knew they wouldn’t be going before she got a glimpse in those halls.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “But let’s make it quick, huh? I’m, like, ninety percent sure that if we stay here too long, we’ll end… actually, I won’t finish that thought.”

“Yeah, thanks, please don’t,” Melody said. “I have enough anxiety about this place without -”

Someone walked across the floor of the room above them.

Both of them fell silent, instantly, looking up.  “Um,” Melody said finally, “what?”

“Okay,” Sabrina said slowly, “scratch the immediate leave order, maybe we should go upstairs, cameras and detectors out, and find that.”

“Yeah, no, nope, yeah, you know, I agree. The, the ghost - you said the one that stole my face? It didn’t touch or hurt you, right?”

“Right.” The cold patch on Sabrina’s cheek tingled ever so slightly; she ignored it. “It, uh, it scared the living hell out of me, but it wasn’t… it wasn’t wasn’t actually dangerous.”

“Cool, okay. Then I think we’re good to head up there.” Melody shuffled her bag around and reached into it up to her elbow, then pulled out a compact silver video camera. “This is old, but, y’know, that’s what you need for this kind of work.”

“Right.”

Melody flipped the side viewscreen out - it  _ was _ old - and tapped it a few times, then glanced to the door. “Okay! Upstairs, quick.”

They hurried out of the room and towards the front of the building, where Melody had encountered the stairs. Sabrina eyed the old wooden steps warily, but Melody headed up them without a second thought, so she followed.

Both of them had cameras out as they hurried down the hall. “It was, what, five doors from the end?” Melody said, breathlessly. Her camera was recording.

“I think so.” The doors of the upstairs rooms were closed, it seems. “Uh - this one? This one?”

“Looks right. You open it.”

“Wh -”

“Video camera!”

“Okay, fine,” Sabrina sighed, and stepped forwards. Her heart was pounding as she laid a hand on the doorknob, and flinched; it was cold. “Metal’s freezing!”

“Good look for us,” Melody whispered.

Sabrina swallowed and turned the handle, pushing the door inwards. It swung open without a sound.

There was nothing inside. Sabrina searched the room, eyes wide, but couldn’t detect anything that didn’t look like exactly the same as the contents of the downstairs rooms.

Melody panned the camera down. “No footprints or anything,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Damn it…”

“Well, let’s look around,” Sabrina said, nervously. “Maybe it, whatever it was, wanted us up here for some reason.”

They stepped into the room, and began to search it over. The window was intact and closed, and the curtains were actually still up, and drawn. Sabrina got a shot of the drawn curtains and the thin sliver of pale light that filtered between them.

It took only a minute or so for Melody to find something. She opened up the desk drawers and gasped out loud, staring down. “Sabi, I got something!”

“What is it?”

In response Melody brought out a small, leather-bound book. Sabrina felt a surge of disappointment - a Bible? Really? - until she opened it, carefully unfolding the first page.

“It’s a diary,” Melody said, voice filled with wonder. “It’s a  _ diary _ from someone who  _ lived _ here.”

When she’d said “Maybe it wanted us up here for some reason,” she’s been  _ joking. _ And yet… “Shit,” she said quietly, staring at it. “I guess we should read it. Thanks, footstep ghost.”

“Thank you,” Melody said, fervently. “You must be different from the ghost that scared the crap out of Sabi here.”

“Has to be. This one’s helpful. Damn!”

The first page, crackly from age and water damage, bore the words “Belonging to Leroy Cooke, aged 14 years, if found please return to me, thank you very much.” It was difficult to read them; time had worn the letters fuzzy around the edges.

Melody looked to the window and shifted her camera to her other hand, then reached over and pulled the curtains aside, filling the room with hazy gray-white light. It was enough for them to read by, and she flipped to the second page in the book, which had a date and a great deal of faded pencil writing. Sabrina squinted at it, trying to read.

“Oh my god,” Melody whispered. “This is amazing.”

_ September 1st, 1952 _

_ Today is my first day at Trakewood. It is a very pretty place. I like it here quite a lot. The woods are very nice, and we’re allowed to wander in them if we want. We don’t have to stay in the buildings as long as we’re not in lessons. I think that’s wonderful! _

_ I love it. It reminds me of the forest at home, but quieter. I obviously haven’t had much time to go out there but fully intend to at my soonest opportunity. _

_ This is a perfectly nice place. I’m very excited to stay here. I do miss home, but that’s alright. The monitors said I’ll get used to it soon. I expect I will. _

_ Leroy _

_ - _

_ September 5th, 1952 _

_ I’m taking another opportunity to write in this notebook. I don’t do it often because I like to keep my thoughts to myself, but I suspect I will forget things if I don’t write them down, so I must try to every so often. _

_ The monitors were right! I’m feeling much more at home now I’ve had a few days to settle in. I did get a chance to take a walkabout in the grounds, and I think it’s truly pretty. The forest seems almost endless when you take the winding paths between the trees! _

_ I heard that there’s a chapel on the grounds. I must find it, so that I can carry on my normal prayers. There has yet to be a Sunday - that’s in a few days - so I’m assuming we’ll assemble there for services. I don’t know why we wouldn’t; Trakewood is a respectable place, or so Mummy said when we decided I would go here. _

_ We haven’t begun classes yet, either. The Madame Director said that we would be getting settled in for our first week, learning how the buildings worked. Everyone is very polite here, and not very strict, though we all obey. I don’t know why we wouldn’t? But it seems that most of the boys here are quieter than they would be if they were elsewhere. I don’t know why I believe that, but I don’t mind it at all. I’ve always liked the quiet. _

_ I shall go and have a look around the courtyard again, to see if I spot anybody causing trouble. I have often learned that if you can’t see any trouble, it’s certainly being made where you aren’t looking. _

_ Leroy _

_ - _

_ September 15th, 1952 _

_ I lost my little book for a short time, and that is why it has been some time since I last wrote. I misplaced it beneath my bed but couldn’t see it with the little light that shines into my room. _

_ I was right about the chapel. We walked down to it for Sunday services, though… try as I might, I can’t seem to recall any specifics about them. It was very early, so I was quite tired. All I know is that the chapel startled me when it came out of the fog, and that I was unable to find my way to it again when I tried to walk there the other day. I didn’t recognize any landmarks, probably because they’d all been awash in mist when we went there for services, so it makes sense I wouldn’t remember the way. _

_ All the same, I do wish I remembered. I’d like to explore the place on my own time, though I doubt the vicar would want me to. _

_ Vicar? I’m not sure. I don’t remember who gave the services. I want to say mass, but I don’t know if it was mass, either. I can’t be certain. I should hope it was a Protestant practice, but there’s no way of knowing. _

_ I don’t think that in and of itself is too much of an issue. I have plenty of other locales to explore, and classes to attend. Lessons are every day of the week save the week-ends, and they only take up a few hours in a day. The rest of the time we are left to our own devices. _

_ It’s quite lax. Far more so than I expected from an esteemed private school like Trakewood. I wonder really how this place won such a reputation when we do so little actual learning. _

_ I haven’t made any friends here, really, because outside of lessons I do not see much of anybody else. Of course I see other boys in the cafeteria, but we don’t speak much. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t mind being on my own. _

_ I’m afraid that what little work I have to do for lessons I have not yet done for tomorrow, so I must cut this short. I will of course keep further records later. _

_ Leroy _

_ - _

_ September 28th, 1952 _

_ A fascinating discovery today! I stumbled upon a graveyard. But it was quite large, and nowhere near the chapel at all, as far as I could tell. I tried to find the chapel, to see if it was nearby, but could not locate it. _

_ I still have not managed to make my way there on my own. I find this unnerving, but unfortunately, I have no ability to retrace the path I take every Sunday. Just like the first week, every Sunday so far has been marked by an early waking by the monitors and a silent walk through the forest to the chapel, shrouded in fog. _

_ Somewhere inside me, I feel as if I should be unnerved by this. But I am not. It simply feels ordinary, normal… natural. _

_ It almost feels as if the fog is  _

There was a slight creaking sound, sweeping through the hallway outside the room, and then a cracking sound as if someone had dropped a wooden chair off the balcony and onto the lower floor, magnified and echoing through the empty halls. Sabrina shrieked and slammed the diary shut, eyes going wide, and Melody yelped and covered her ears. Both of them glanced frantically around. The sound had come from the front of the dormitory building, that much was clear, and to Sabrina, it suddenly became clear exactly how trapped they were in this building, with only two exits she knew of - Melody’s window and her cellar door, which they’d have to go through the basement to reach.

She met Melody’s eyes and knew the other woman had just run through the same thought process. “We overstayed our welcome,” Sabrina said, and  _ knew _ somehow that it was true. “We gotta get out of here.”

In unison, the two turned and looked towards the window. Where before the trees had been a tapestry of wood and leaves beyond the dirty glass, now there was only the outlines of a few of the tree-trunks visible through the fog of white.

“We gotta get the frickety-frackin’ heck outta here,” Melody agreed, her eyes going even wider, and both of them stood and, leaving the rest of the room behind, darted into the hallway.

“Which way do we go? Cellar or window?”

“Uhhhh, uhhhh,” Melody said, frantically calculating as she looked towards the far end of the building, the end from which the crash had originated. “I, um, well, if we want to go to my window, I think we have to go round through the front of the building, unless we break some ground floor windows or find a door leading into the courtyard.”

“I didn’t see one into the courtyard, I think this building doesn’t  _ have _ one,” Sabrina hissed frantically, and realized she was raising her voice, because there was a strange fuzz to the air - not like static, or like blowing wind, but it was something that was making it hard to hear Melody’s voice, or any other ambient sounds. It was if she were hearing a specific type of silence that was rising in her ears, blocking out all noise.

“Okay, front or we gotta go down through the cellar,” Melody said. “That’s all we got! We can try and break out another ground-floor window -”

“Let’s do that,” Sabrina said, tossing her reservations about vandalism out the window. Her heartbeat thundered in her skull. “Now let’s  _ go! _ ”

They sprinted down the hall. Melody still had her camera out, and Sabrina had the passing thought that this footage would be completely useless, or at least this segment of it would be. Just them muttering at each other and running, sending the view flying all over the place. Totally unwatchable. She wondered what Chris would say when he saw it.

Probably something nice, knowing Chris. He was tolerant.

She tripped on the floor and stumbled, but didn’t fall, and slammed her mind back into the present. Now was  _ not _ the time to let her thoughts wander!

The stairwell at the far end of the hallway led down in a couple of narrow switchbacks of creaking wood, and Sabrina spared only the fleetest thought for a prayer that the stairs didn’t collapse under their weight, as they hadn’t tested these ones. They didn’t, and the two reporters emerged onto the ground floor with the roar of silent wind in their ears and a frantic fear filling their veins.

The first window they saw looking outwards was the first one they used. Melody took off her bag and handed it to Sabrina, then pulled off her jacket and wrapped it around one fist. The deadening of sound was growing stronger.

“Go!” Sabrina shouted, flinching at the way the words vanished in the howling maelstrom of not-sound that filled her mind. Melody gritted her teeth and punched the window with all her strength, several times, until she finally managed to break through the glass. It was just a single pane with some wooden supports, and she twisted those out of the way and dragged herself through without a second thought. Sabrina held Melody’s bag out through the window, then her own, and finally put her own hands on the windowsill, feeling the shards of broken glass prick at her skin.

In that moment, she turned, feeling a strange compulsion to pause for just a second. Her gaze fell on the end of the hallway, and it was there, for a brief moment, that she saw a figure.

It was short, nothing like the strange, un-Melody she’d seen before. From what Sabrina could tell, it appeared to be a child or early teenager, a boy wearing some type of uniform…

“...Leroy?” Sabrina whispered, on a whim. Her body felt frozen in place.

“Sabi! Come  _ on! _ ” Melody shouted from outside.

The boy watched her, silently, carefully, calmly. He shook his head.

“We gotta get out of here,” Sabrina whispered, and though she could only hear the sound of silent wind, she knew that her words reached him.

He nodded.

“We are gonna get out of here,” she said.

The boy shook his head.

“Sabrina!”

The glass under her cut into her skin, and Sabrina pulled a hand back with a hiss, seeing the bright red well up against the dark brown of her palm. She looked back to the boy, but he was gone. The roar in her mind, somehow, felt… closer.

She had to get out of here. Without a second thought, Sabrina put her free hand on the windowsill, ignoring the feel of glass on her skin, and vaulted through it. Her foot caught on the sill and sent her tumbling to the ground, but she made it out.

The second she was free of the window, the screaming nothingness in her head vanished, and suddenly she could think, and hear, and everything around her was calm.

“Hurt my hand,” she said, as she opened her eyes and saw Melody standing above her. “Ow.”

“Sabi, we gotta go.” Melody said, and all the humor was gone from her voice. Her face was ever so slightly blurred, as if through a pane of misty glass. “We really do.”

“Yeah. I know.” Sabrina rolled over and stood, glancing down - there at least didn’t appear to be glass embedded in her hand, so that was good. She pressed a thumb against the cut and bit her lip against the throb of pain. “We, uh… we…”

She trailed off as she finally looked around. They were outside the ground floor of the dormitory building, but the scenery had changed. The forest was still there… she assumed. Sabrina could only make out the slightest shapes of the looming trees and the towering canopy, surrounding them, because as far as she could see, they were surrounded on all sides by a thick, white fog.


	7. Invisible

Sabrina turned in a slow circle, her eyes wide. Suddenly, all the mentions of fog in the papers and the diary they’d found came back to her all at once. The fog… it had been mentioned time and time again, and now she felt that it was… ominous, perhaps. Malevolent? She didn’t know if she’d go that far.

“We gotta get back to my car,” she decided, and looked in the direction she was pretty sure her car was. The dormitory building’s main entryway faced outwards towards the forest, away from the Administration building, so they’d have to go out from the back of it to reach the main drive and Sabrina’s car.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Melody looked around, trying to see through the fog. “No, yeah. We’re - we’re going.”

With a deep, shaky breath, Sabrina turned in the direction of her car and started walking. She heard Melody hurry up beside her, and without even thinking reached out for her hand. Melody took it.

For a moment, they strode into the fog, leaving the dormitory behind. Sabrina knew it would only be a few minutes’ walk through the forest, fifteen at most, before they reached Administration. She took deep, practiced breaths, keeping her eyes on the path. 

For a few minutes, in the monotony of her walk with Melody tagging along beside her and keeping closer than she knew she normally would, Sabrina had the thought of  _ what if we don’t find the building? _

It was ridiculous, she knew. Silly. Of course they’d find the building - it was there. The land wasn’t going to mysteriously shift or change. They were on the road, and it wouldn’t fade or redirect beneath their feet. There weren’t any twists or turns they could accidentally take. It was a simple walk, a short walk, and at the end of it, they would find the building. Administration. Classrooms. A great main hall with an unstable floor and occasionally a tall, wavering ghost.

She took another long breath, in and out, and as she steeled her mind against the anxiety that clawed at it, she saw a shape through the fog - not another tree looming over the path but the sharp, hard edge of the building’s back doorway, stark and strange against the wavering woods. Sabrina nearly cried in relief, but held herself together - that could wait, for later at the hotel, when she was in the shower, perhaps.

“Oh thank God,” Melody gasped, when it came into view. “Oh, thank  _ God.” _

Sabrina privately agreed. She stepped up to it, watching the columns and stairs form through the mist, seeing the empty staring windows appear above and around her. “We made it here,” she said. “Now just back through to the car and we can get the hell out of here.”

Melody opened her mouth. Sabrina knew what she was going to say - perhaps they ought to go around, and not through. After all, they could find something else on the outside, or perhaps the inside would be too dark and dangerous. And the inside was clearly haunted.

“Look around,” Sabrina said softly, cutting her off.

Melody glanced backwards. Behind them, the way they’d come, was only fog. Around them, the misty gray cutout shapes of trees served as sentinels at the edges of their vision; the rest of the world may as well have not existed. Sabrina couldn’t see to the ends of the Administration building’s wings. She knew she didn’t like the interior of Administration, but right now, the alternative was worse.

Melody bit her lip. “Yeah, never mind,” she muttered, shivering slightly. “You’re right. Let’s - let’s go through.”

They stepped up, to the back door, and traced their original path through the building. Nothing happened. Sabrina half expected them to be spooked by another spectre of the ancient halls, but nothing of the sort occurred. She didn’t even feel the same sort of sensation of being watched as she had before; it seemed almost as if, in here, the danger she felt from the outside was lessened. Who ever thought she could find this creepy old building  _ comforting? _

She hadn’t expected it. But by the time they reached the front door and stepped out, lowering their masks to breathe in the fresh, damp air, Sabrina was feeling much more at ease, more confident.

That ended immediately when she looked to her car and saw that it wasn’t there.

“Uh,” she said, and froze. “Um.”

Melody followed her gaze. “...isn’t that where we parked the car?” she asked, after a few very long moments of silence.

The forest around them was heavy, listening. “Yeah,” Sabrina answered, slowly. “It is. It definitely is.”

“Well, you - did you put the parking brake on?” Melody twisted the single golden bangle on her left wrist around, around, around, the cold metal sticking and tugging on her clammy skin. “Maybe it rolled off.”

“I hope so,” Sabrina said. “If it got stolen by graffiti kids I’ll be pissed.”

They both knew  _ that _ one wasn’t true, for sure. There hadn’t been a single graffiti tag in the entire place so far, which was shocking for a building as old, grand, and empty as this.

_ Grand. _ Yes, that was a term for this place. It held grandeur, in its mildewing walls, its creaking floors, the rotting linen curtains and the old oak doors. Faded grandeur, perhaps, but still there, majestic and old. It was the kind of place that held awe even in its festering decay.

And it wasn’t even that decayed. It wasn’t like some of the abandons Sabrina had documented, with their structure collapsing further with each step she took. This place didn’t have rainwater leaking in or birds nesting in its rafters. But it was older.

Something wasn’t adding up. She couldn’t wrap her head around it, couldn’t put the pieces together. She shook her head. “Let’s find my car,” she said, and managed to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Right. Let’s look… well, which direction was it faced? Let’s look behind it first, and then in front. Look for where it could’ve rolled off to.”

They tried that. There were no marks in the grass, no tracks or trails that could have told them where it had gone. There was absolutely nothing on either side of the circular gravel drive that surrounded the old fountain.

“Okay,” Melody said slowly, “well… now what?”

“We walk to the gate.” Sabrina said, turning her face in that direction. “We’ll just go there and head through it. The bars weren’t too close together, I’m betting we could just walk through, pretty much.”

“Right. Yeah. We’ll give that a go, then.”

With that, they turned and headed towards the gate. Moving through the forest on foot was unnerving. It felt exposed and dangerous; with the fog everywhere, there was no way Sabrina could potentially see anything that might be in the trees.

That made her more nervous than she’d ever felt.

With Melody beside her, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Sabrina shuddered to think about what this would be like if she were here alone.  _ Thank God Chris made me take a partner. I mean, I probably would’ve anyway, but I’ve never been happier that he’s been so insistent on something. We’ll have to thank him when we get cell service again. _

The walk down the drive was longer than the walk between buildings, by a lot. The forest didn’t seem to move or change around them. They’d been walking for what Sabrina thought was probably twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes when she paused, squinting at the fog ahead. “The forest hasn’t changed,” she said, slowly.

“I mean, it just looks the same,” Melody said, with a shrug. “Forests do. Especially in fog.”

“No, I mean - we should have reached at least a curve in the road by now.”

“We probably passed it without realizing.”

Sabrina knew that Melody wasn’t being obtuse on purpose. She was afraid, and she was trying to make things make sense in her mind. But it wasn’t helping. “Mel,” she said, flatly, “something's wrong.”

“I know, Sabi, don’t you think I realize that?”

“Right. We must be going the wrong way. This isn’t right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Absolutely. Something about this is wrong, and I don’t know what. But I don’t think we’re going towards the gate.”

“What do you think we’re going to, then?”

“...I don’t know.”  _ Nothing. Towards nothing. There’s nothing out there. It's like you’re at the edge of a video game map, running into the invisible wall, jogging casually against a barrier you can’t perceive. You’re trapped. _ “But I don’t think we’re going the right way.”

“It’s the only way that isn’t towards the Asylum!” Melody gestured back the way they’d come, voice raised a bit above its norm now. “You think there’s another exit off a single two-way road?”

Sabrina glanced back at their path and stopped. “Mel,” she said, “what the fuck.”

Melody turned and looked. Perhaps fifteen meters behind them, at the edge of their vision, they could both clearly see the drive split into two branches that formed a circle, surrounding a stone fountain that wasn’t functioning. The circle led up to a hulking building, just a silhouette in the gloom.

Stunned, Melody opened her mouth and shut it again. Sabrina swallowed nervously.

“We’ve been walking away from that thing for like half an hour!” Melody finally managed, staring. “I don’t understand. I don’t - what is  _ going on?!” _

Sabrina dug her phone out of her pocket. She clicked the screen on, and it showed her only the time - a little past 1 pm - and her phone’s power, which was at 48%. And the service - there was none. “Can’t call Chris,” she muttered. “Or the police. Or… anybody.”

“I bet mine’s the same way,” Melody muttered, digging through her pockets. She pulled out her phone and powered the screen on, then sighed. “Yeah. Nothing.”

“O-kay,” SAbrina said. “Okay. Okay. Uh.”

“I don’t think we’re meant to leave.” Melody swallowed after saying it, as if she’d spoken something forbidden, and glanced around, her dark eyes darting back and forth. “I - that sounds weird, i know, but I think it’s true. We’re not meant to get out of here.”

“Not right now, anyway,” Sabrina corrected, unwilling to think of anything else. “Not right now. But I bet we can find a way. What about… Uh. What about…”

They were both silent for a moment.

“We got a phone call from this place,” Melody suddenly said. “Right?”

“Well, it was  _ about _ this place.”

“Close enough. There must be a phone here. We should find it. If it called out, then we can call out using it too, yeah?”

“We don’t know that there’s a phone here. That call could’ve come from anywhere.”

“Sure, and what else do you want to do?” Melody held her hands out, then let them drop to her sides. “Sit around and do nothing, I guess. We’ve really run ourselves out of options here!”

She was right. Sabrina rubbed her forehead with one hand. “You’re right. Sorry. Sorry. We - where do you think it is?”

“Somewhere in Administration, probably. We should search the building more thoroughly.” Melody set her eyes on the Administration building, a hard edge shining in their depths. “We gotta find that phone and get the hell out of this place. It’s freaking me out, and I kind of hate it now. Pretty plants or not. I don’t care how nice it is, I’m done reporting on it.”

“No argument here.” Sabrina turned and followed her. True to her fears, it took only a few paces to get them into the main drive, and they strode past the fountain and back up to the building.

_ Are you proud? Do you feel triumph? _ Sabrina thought, looking back up at the building’s title, the words in grimy bronze emblazoned over its entryway.  _ Have you gotten what you wanted? What is it that you want, anyway? Us to be here? Are we supposed to find something that we’ve missed? Do you have more ghosts to show us? Do you simply want to feel our fear, our pain, our terror and surprise? Why are you doing this? _

None of her questions were answered, of course. They never were. No gods had ever answered Sabrina before, and she saw no reason for them to start doing so now. She sighed.

Melody went in first, pulling the mask back over her face. Sabrina followed. There was no mysterious shadow in the main hall, nor any of the hallways they ventured down, and they did venture down all of them. The building was large, and they stuck together, but even though it took hours they searched the entire thing.

The result was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sabrina had figured something like a phone would be in the Director’s office, perhaps, but there was nothing in it that they hadn’t already seen. Just the desk, its papers, and that old painting in the rear of the room, which Sabrina left well alone.

After probably forty minutes of searching, maybe an hour, Melody let out a long, slow breath and turned to Sabrina. “Sabi,” she said, “I don’t want to say this. But…”

“No,” Sabrina said. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s going to be night if we don’t figure out what’s happening. I - we can’t be here at night!”

“We are  _ not _ splitting up.”

“Sabi, it’s probably the only way!”

No. No. No! Sabrina did  _ not _ want to hear it. “This place is already creepy as hell. The  _ last _ thing I want to be while I’m here is  _ alone!” _

The word rang out, and vanished into the fog, dampened like it had fallen on pillows, or snow. The sound was swallowed, destroyed. Sabrina and Melody peered into the creeping mist.

Nothing. No one.

“We have to,” Melody said.

“No!”

“Sabi, I don’t want to sound weird, but if we don’t find that phone, I think that theres a chance we’re never getting out of here,” Melody hissed. “Seriously! Do you want that? We have to find it. And we’re going to have to split upt to find it.”

“No. I don’t - no. If we split up, we’re never meeting up again. I can feel it!”

“If we find the phone, we’ll be fine!”

“We don’t even know there  _ is _ a phone! And you want to split up and pretend it exists?” Sabrina bit down hard on her lip and swore, feeling the pain bloom in her skin and the faint tang of blood leak onto her tongue. “That’s bullshit! We are  _ not _ abandoning each other based on some kind of idea that we don’t even know is true or not!”

“Then we’ll just have to keep going. Slow as ever.” Meldy’s expression went stony, then gentle, and she shrugged, dropping her hands to her sides. “...sorry.”

It wasn’t in the Administration building. “It’s f - it’s fine. Sorry. I mean, I am too. Uh… where do we search next?” Sabrina asked, feeling her fear and anger fade away, calm as the fog. “The Dormitory…?”

“We already looked through there. Besides, there’s something in there that does  _ not _ want us around. We should try for the Asylum instead.”

“Oh, do we  _ have _ to?” Sabrina rubbed her hands along her upper arms, shaking away the mist. “That one’s creepy…”

“Hey, you don’t know that. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe it’ll be cheerful inside. Not all asylums are creepy and full of ghosts.”

“Judging how this place has been so far, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”

“Positivity, Sabi. Positivity.” Melody seemed to have forgiven and forgotten their argument of moments before. “We’ll have to see, huh?”

Sabrina still had the map on her phone, which she pulled out and clicked on. The battery was still alive, but not for much longer if she kept using it. She turned on the battery saver. “Uh, back towards the dorms, but then further off to the right. There should be another drive - er, a path, anyway, that leads that way. It’s a little bit of a walk, but this is actually the building that’s closest to the edges of the grounds of Trakewood.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“I don’t know? How should I - it’s probably just like that by chance. I don’t really see a reason… are you taking notes?”

“Yeah,” Melody said, tapping on her own phone’s screen. “Because when we get out, this is gonna make for a  _ hell _ of an article. We should be taking photos of this stuff, too.”

“Oh, you’re right. I guess.” Sabrian had lost all thoughts of recording the phenomena occurring around her as soon as the fog had closed in, but she supposed Melody was right. She pulled out the polaroid and, on a whim, snapped a photo of Melody swathed in fog, wisps of vapor tugging at her shoelaces and jacket hem, hair laying flat against her shoulders and bag, untouched by any breeze or wind. There was nothing here, just the fog and the forest.

Melody caught her looking and smiled, waving at the camera. “Cheese,” she said, weakly.

“Greetings from Trakewood,” Sabrina said, as the photograph slid out. “Glad you’re not here!”

Melody laughed. The sound was swallowed by the fog, but it still brought a spot of brightness into Sabrina’s heart, even if just for a moment. She let out a breath, feeling more of her anxiety fade.  _ Calm down, Sabi. Just tackle this like any other problem, and you’ll get out just fine. You’ll get out JUST fine. _

The walk was longer than that of the path to the dormitory. The forest, around them, was utterly silent; all the birdcalls and animal sounds from before were gone.It was definitely unnatural, Sabrina could tell; she was absolutely certain of it. Something was doing this to them.  _ We’ll show you. We humans don’t give up easy, _ she thought, and then wondered why she was treating a ghost like an alien.  _ We living humans, I mean. We don’t just accept this. We’re gonna get out of here, mark my words. _

Before her, Melody peered into the fog. “Is that it?” she said, and took a few quick steps forward, form becoming obscured by the mist. Sabrina felt a stab of panic.

“Mel, wait,” she said, hurrying after her. “Don’t get too far away.”

“I’m right here, relax,” Melody said, glancing back towards her. Her face was a few blurry smears in the fog, features indistinct, as if viewed through a pane of oiled glass. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good.”

Sabrina had never liked being alone. She’d grown up with one sister, and she was the older. She’d loved her younger sister, and sure, while she’d sometimes been annoyed by her, she was never the kind of person who wished for solitude. She liked having someone around. She needed to have someone around. She didn’t like being alone.

Melody took a few more steps. She moved faster than Sabrina did - probably because she was a little taller, and had longer legs - and Sabrina half-jogged to catch up to her.

“Come on! It’s just up ahead,” Melody said.

“Slow  _ down!” _

“Hurry up!”

Melody’s shape blurred and vanished for a moment. And that was all it took - Sabrina leaped forward, in the fog, but it didn’t reappear. “Mel? Melody?!”

“Sabi, c - wait, where…?”

“Mel!”

She turned in a circle, searching. But the mist was a blank white screen on all sides, and she couldn’t see anything.

“Melody!” she shouted, and her voice died in the air. She wanted to swear, to scream - they should have stuck together, they should have held hands or tied themselves together with rope or  _ something _ \- 

“Sabrina!”

She turned - another mistake. Instantaneously, she was unsure of which direction she’d come from. She looked down frantically, to try and see if she’d left footprints in the grass - no, this was gravel. No. No. She saw the path leading back and forwards, and turned back, and lunged into the fog.

Around her, it swirled, tearing like gauze as she passed through it. But Melody was nowhere to be seen. “Melody, where are you?”

“Sabi, say something! I’m trying to find you!”

“Mel, I’m still on the path, right near where I was. Come back towards me.”

Silence.

“Mel?”

Nothing answered her voice; it dropped dead into the fog, still. She took a few steps forward, then a few more, then turned around. There was nothing.

“Melody, that isn’t funny. Answer me.”

Her voice vanished as soon as the words passed her lips; it dropped into the fog, dead before the sounds even finished forming. Silence and void, pale white and gray, surrounding her. Like a withered flower petal.

She turned in place again, searching the haze, but there was no mistaking it. Melody was gone, and she was alone.


End file.
